Everybody Says I'm Fine!

A fantastically dramatic directorial debut by Rahul Bose.What can I say? I loved the movie an its characters! quite extreme? of course, and quite rightly so .Bose's depiction of the wonderfully complicated lives of today's Mumbaiites who are brought together in the central theme of the movie.With a touch of Marquez's magical realism, the movie revolves around the need for self preservation through a pretence of normality.The characters want their chaotic lives buried away from the public eye as they continue to pretend that everything IS fine. Perversely enough, curiosity always gets the better of the public eye as they poke and prod and dig beneath the ground for treasures of guarded secrets. But do we really want to know the truth? For this flick the Indian audience need to fasten their seat-belts, for truth is bizarre, complex and utterly saddening. All in all a brave attempt and thoroughly enjoyable! An appeal to the Indian audience:

About a barber who can hear the flow of thinking of the person to whom he is giving a haircut. He helps them(his customers) courteously but somehow directly by the information unknowingly given by themselves. He meets a girl and gets intimate with her, only to find that she has been abused by her successful father whom himself is also the barber's customer.

An excellent film...funny, charming, wry, yet also gritty and compelling. Nikita (Koel Purie) has a cathartic scene reminiscent of Liv Ullman in Bergman's "Face to Face." She submerges herself in a fugue state unflinchingly. The climactic turn of events lift the film to a more profound conclusion than the first half augured.

I saw this film, the director's first attempt, when it debuted at the Philly Film Festival in 2002. I found it to be VERY disappointing. Without giving too much away, the director takes a clichéd Bollywoodian approach to very strong themes of sexual abuse, revenge and violence.

In the Q& A period following the film, the director admitted that some of the events were based on his true experiences, he explained as well that he had wanted to avenge a close friend through the story he portrayed. It is quite clear that he was much too emotionally close to resolving his own demons when he made this film. As a result, the film is extremely naive. Being passionate about cinema and world cinema in particular, I walked away incredibly frustrated.

I was more than surprised to see Rahul Bose create an artistically moving and very indigenous piece of cinema in his clever directorial debut Everybody Says I'm Fine! that I was completely hooked to the screen the entire 100 minutes even as lead actor Rehan Engineer puts up a wooden face whenever he is supposed to act. For a film released in 2001, watching it in 2018 feels like a run down the memory lane, especially if you have been in Mumbai, as director Bose checks all the boxes in his product - Apple computers, upscale salon, trendy socialites, typical socialite talk with that vanity, young romance - and I sat there looking at them like a kid drooling at an ice-cream van's menu. Engineer plays a beauty salon owner who is also the head stylist/barber in the heart of the city and which is frequented by the socialites of the upper class Mumbai. Under his clean-shaven look and balding mane is the absurd power of hearing another person's thoughts whenever he cuts their hair, giving him a wholly different picture of the person than what they have concocted for the outside world. I don't think I have ever seen that concept out in the wild and it is absolutely fascinating to be a spectator with Xen, the character, as opens his shop, listens to a dozen inner thoughts, and goes back to sleep. Everybody Says I'm Fine! is made linearly and has bold scenes at every juncture, which I think must have contributed to how it was received close to two decades earlier. It even has Bose in a starring role (an eccentric), Boman Irani at his fine air of a businessman, and Pooja Bhatt - all of whom are so fun to watch regardless of their characters. I was blown away by the entire parade of proceedings that Everybody Says I'm Fine! churns out with so much substance and energy that I was a bit disappointed by how it ends. Looked like Bose was unable to bid adieu to his creative flow as the comedy drama ends like a bag full of water and one tiny leaking hole. Everyone interested in Bollywood should check it out though. TN.