Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara

What happened to our mainstream Hindi cinema at last? One after other it is coming out with excellent and diverse themes never dealt before. Wow ! When FTII-alumni, internationally renowned Assamese film maker Jahnu Barua and Anupam P. Kher as producer-lead actor comes together, you expect a result to be of very high value. Yes, it is, as what starts off as a touching tale about a Retd. College lecturer (Anupam Kher) who falls prey to Alzheimer disease and how the lives of everybody around him get affected ends on a very topical note of ignorance of values in today's world, very subtly. This is the second feature film in Hindi of Jahnu Barua who directed another one called Apekshaa (1984) though almost all his films are in Assamese and also based in soil there. There are some amazing performances viz. Anupam Kher and also Urmila Matondkar who is quite restrained here. More than anything this film succeeds in making any layman realize and empathize to deal with somebody close whom this disease affects. This film qualifies for select audience, as it is devoid of any of those rubbish commercial elements of forced romance and songs, hero-heroine track or inconsequential sub-plots but come across as very honest film with more substance than style. Bappi Lahiri surprised with his background score. The film has no political overtones as the title suggests but a human story. The problem? Well the story is too simplistically told so much so that to pack it in duration of 1.45 hr, the pace slows down, as the events are not too many. Also, it would be better if it covered more of the disease part and treatment part but of course that was not the focus of the film. The drama in the staged part of the courtroom also lacks that required punch. Nonetheless it put across the message very clearly and aptly and thus succeeds without taking a road to melodramatic Indian ethos or art house cinema. Also, distributor Yashraj Films deserves a pat on their shoulders for bringing a quality product, which is so contemporary, and a must especially for youth audience. A sooner Tax-free status is demanded.

When I say disappointment, I mean by Jahnu Barua's standard, and not by Bollywood 'standard', if there is any such thing as standard in Bollywood! Undoubtedly, by the yardsticks of Bollywood, Jahnua Barua's "Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara" is a masterpiece, but....

...by Jahnu Barua's standard, this movie is sub par. Jahnu Barua had won awards in Fribourg, Locarno and other places for his movies, he had been one of the pioneers of serious cinema in Assam (after Dr. Bhabendra Nath Saikia,and also, to some extent, Padum Barua, Deuti Duwara and a handful of others) probably the best known Assamese name to the moviegoers outside Assam (after Bhupen Hazarika and maybe, just maybe, Begum Parbeen Sultana); he showed that someone like Indra Bania, otherwise known only as a comedic actor, could deliver serious performance, he has used the talents of Bishnu Kharghoria, the best Assamese actor of all time (in my subjective opinion), in all his movies, he used theater personalities such as Dulal Roy, and has made many Assamese persons think (and to appreciate serious movies).

Of course, the pitfall of making serious movies in a society plagued by cheap Bombay formula movies is that Jahnua Barua had real problems arranging even Rs. 15 Lakhs (that is, Rs. 1.5 Million, or equivalent of USD 35,000), the minimum amount he needed to make a movie in Assamese. I read this in an interview, where he said that, he would give up making movies in Assamese, as it was too much waste of his time and effort to keep struggling to arrange the money. I also read a letter to the editor by someone in Guwahati, who said that when he arrived to watch a Jahnu Barua movie, the manager of the cinema hall declined to run it, not because he was an idiot, but because even after 30 minutes of the scheduled time, there were only 2 (yes, two!) patrons at the box office!

And as a result, someone as dedicated as Jahnu Barua has to make a movie in Hindi in Bollywood style, where a retired college professor gets to live in a huge mansion (in Bombay, of all places!), and the movie has to end with an absurd courtroom drama!

I do not mean that this is a bad movie; this is not. This movie is yards above the usual Bollywood stuff, 99% of which is stolen from Hollywood (and now also European Cinema: a case in point being Bheja Fry). This movie contains the same sincerity of Barua, that made his movies in Assamese excellent. But this movie does not belong to Jahnu Barua; it was obviously handicapped by the terms of the producers, who made it have some of the tell-tale elements of Bollywood escapism.

So, in a nut-shell, between mutation of the Assamese brain and Bollywood, Jahnu Barua is the casualty.

Once an English film director was reported expressing surprise why so many Bollywood films come out every year and almost none of them carries a story except filmy romance and skin-show. Here is the answer- Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara, a film by renowned director Jahnu Barua. With Anupam Kher and Urmila's superb acting and Barua's excellent direction the film deserves to be a must see. Bollywood industry should produce much more films of this kind instead of its tradition of producing rubbish films. Direction: 10/10; Acting- Anupam Kher: 10/10, Urmila: 9/10; Story: 9/10; Photography: 10/10; Dialogue: 9/10; Music(Background): 10/10.

I've never seen Mr. Bahru movie before, neither Mr kher's saanrch. but one thing that really struck me is that if u combine the finest people from Bellwood you definitely something spellbinding. this movie is surely one of the best in performances/story/screenplay and even background music. kher is disturbingly fantastic and we cud compare him with amitabh's performance in black. he played his character with utmost perfection leaving us shocked and shattered in the end. Urmila, on the other hand, is the most underrated actress of Bellwood. i don't want to describe how amazingly she performed because we all know that her performance is always 10 by 10 right from Pinjar, bhoot or Ek hasina thi. this year i sincerely hope she gets her long delayed national award as she acted on the level of shabana azmi & smita Patel. MGKNM succeeds in capturing father/daughter relationship which an over hyped movie called YAADEIN miserably failed to do so. even the kavita is like satisfying your soul.

Anupam Kher & Urmila Matondkar totally pull their respective characters together. It is because of them, accompanied by a good plot, that I rate it a 7.8/10.

Directly getting to the point in less than 10 minutes keeps the viewer hooked on to what might be the cause of happenings in the screen. A sense of suspense grows and even though the screenplay feeds us constantly, another revelation towards the end does make sense. The courtroom drama at the end is worth a watch.

What the makers fail here is to keep away from boring sequences wherein the characters are speaking/enacting something, while the actual plot is narrated. It does turn off the experience. Dialogs are just fine, while the character building is very good. Not going astray, Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Maara is a engaging watch.

BOTTOM LINE: Cinema aficionados & critic will love it alike. Once again, great performances, I have to mention.

Can be watched with a typical Indian family? YES

Profanity/Nudity/Sex: No | Violence: Mediocre | Gore: No | Smoking: Very Mild | Alcohol/Drugs: No