Lovesongs – Yesterday Today Tomorrow, a movie that comes and goes without any remarkable impression on you! As per me, even though offbeat films are a matter of inquisitive nosiness, this one fell flat on its nose. Seems like it has been pondered over 22 years for Director Jayabrato Chatterjee to come up with this movie! The last one this journalist cum poet turned film maker (what a conveniently growing path!) Jayabrato Chatterjee’s last movie was Kehkashaan (starred by Victor Banerjee, Girish Karnad and Mallika Sarabhai) a movie lying under a heap of dust from ages. May be the director is still living in the days of Communalism and Naxalism struck Kolkatta, but we have come really far off from that era. And when we have great movies excogitating about this theme and troubled relations caused due to it or somehow entwined with it, then what more does this love song sung by Jayabrato Chatterjee hopes to prove.
Rating: 2.5/5
The movie has some very good actors who prove simply too good for this one. One would wonder why and how Jaya Bachchan decided to repeat herself as a single mother having a troubled relation with a rebellious child. Come on, have we not seen her in movies like Fiza and a lot of others not worth mentioning here. She has been doing so perfectly well that one would think she has been practicing it really over and over again. An actress of such prowess as she is, without even going into a debate on her great character portrayals, she should stop going for repetition as the audience is sure to be bored to death without any contriving freshness or exclusivity about it. Sorry to the similar expressions and often noticed sequences do not ass a feather to her cap. Somebody needs to stop her and say, you are much more than playing a failed or troubled mother.
Jaya Bachchan, Om Puri in LoveSongs
Lovesongs opens up with a most loved medium by Indian audience that is songs or music, gelling perfectly well with the scenes that go on in the movies in retrospect. Jaya Bachchan plays a positively good-humored widow Mridula Chatterjee, who runs a charity home or NGO to help disabled people and tries to give meaning to her life that was once grief stricken of failed relations lost by either misfortune or misunderstanding. She has been single handedly bringing up her only grandchild Rohan, played by Prithviraj Choudhury, with lots of love and a pinch of moral lessons. Rohan is a happy and sensible college going kid who come home on a vacation and along with his sweetheart Tara played Deol Basu is curious about his intriguing and charming granny whom he calls ‘Nans’. Mridula finally decides to look back upon on her untold life to quench the thirst of Rohan. The movie runs in a mixture of flashback and present scenarios with songs creating the required catharsis like a French opera. Indeed, a noble way for a director to try out an experimental mode of presentation, only it lacks the depth that would have added the extra punch.
Mridula goes on to reflect on her early life, her love for the enigmatic poet and idealist Aftab Jaffrey, played by Om Puri. However, this love is sacrificed on the altar of communal dissimilarities between the two and Mridula goes for an inevitable yet fateful arranged marriage. She loses her husband soon after, leaving her with a daughter Palaash (debutant Shahana Chaterjee) to rear. As a single mother, Mridula tries to give the best life she could but the dominating screenplay comes into picture and the daughter chooses to become a night club singer and marries a wayward drummer Dev. Their fatal marriage has failure written all over it and soon the daughter has to return to the mother’s loving arms. Palaash becomes even more restless with the revelation about her birth. The father who she thinks is dead is not really her biological father and the indication of its being the lost love of her mother is only obvious. The movie’s cultivated screenplay doesn’t end here and it goes on to plan a meeting between Mridula and Aftab. This leads to another revelation that the grass on the other side isn’t greener as well. Aftab is stuck with a chronic alcoholic and hysteric but very beautiful wife Rabia (a purely wasted Mallika Sarabhai!).
>> Om Puri at the premiere of film Love Songs: Mallika Sarabai, Om Puri, Jayabrato Chaterjee, Usha Uthup at the premiere of film Love Songs in Metro Adlabs on March 26th 2008.
Jaya Bachchan and Shahana Chatterjee in LoveSongs
The music director Pritam Chakraborty and Siddharth Suhas try to give the subtlety that the screenplay should have done; well done! keeping in mind, it is a ‘lovesong’. Jayabrato Chatterjee has not created anything worthwhile even though the movie has been nominated for the Cannes and the like; it definitely lacks the charisma that was intended. It is a slice of life but doesn’t get the generalization of an ordinary life, the wish to capture troubled and sensitive emotional issues of making a saga around ordinary people interwoven in extraordinary circumstances (as described by certain knowledgeable critics; extraordinary incidents? an arranged marriage is not an extraordinary event, neither is the death of the daughter after a storming scene of mother-daughter confrontation or the lovers meeting after years in Birbhum!). The dialogues are pretty clumsy, say for example ‘yes, we were falling in love’ is so very unlike to an ordinary person. The cinematography by Soumik Haldar is worth mentioning, the visuals are without doubt typical to a good offbeat movie and very naturalistic. Jaya Bachchan and Om Puri are known as great actors but here they lack versatility. Debutant Sahana is also good and would have done even better without the melodramatic feats. The well-known dancer Mallika Sarabhai is a class beauty but completely wasted in hysterics and tear shedding scenes.
Finally, the movie isn’t made to add taste to all mouths, while some might enjoy it, some might find it too bland to give any flavor. A definite ‘not for the masses movie’, go for it, if you wish to join the so-called gang of the ‘Something different’!
Rating: 2.5/5
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY” (JAYA DIDI)
CONGRATULATION FOR “62 ANNIVERSERY”.