Film Review
Dhobi Ghat – Mumbai Diaries
It reminded me of Naseeruddin Shah’s directorial debut 'Yun Hota Toh Kya Hota'. Dhobi Ghat actually follows the same pattern. The filmmaker picks up a set of characters and contrives converging stories around them. Kiran Rao’s fascination for these characters is a bit too deliberate to be taken as the childlike curiosity of an artist. And she hangs on to the known clichés about the city of Mumbai and if that is her perspective of the bustling metropolis, she did not have a strong raison d'être to make this film.
It is like you don’t have something important to say and simply want to carry on with harmless conversations around because that is what you are supposed to do at a party, and you consider it a significant life experience. That is the big and deep pit a true artist must avoid.
Kiran has been carrying the banner of ‘art house cinema’ proudly around without realising that the phrase is an invention of marketing guys. A filmmaker makes a film, it’s others like academicians and marketing wizards who classify and brand it as a film of this genre or that, as commercial or art house cinema, for various reasons. Every film can be a piece of art, including hard porn and wedding videos.
So a debutant director need not begin with the premise that he or she is making an ‘art house’ or a ‘festival’ film. It defeats the whole purpose. Cinema is about self-discovery and expression, like every other art form and begins with a strong urge to say something that we feel needs to be said and that has not been said before by anyone else. It is that urge which makes you work hard on your film, and we all agree that making a film is really a tough and demanding enterprise. The established filmmakers probably can afford the luxury of making a film for its own sake. They are caught in the regular filmmaking rut and they have to keep going at it. A debutant cannot and must not commit such follies.
Dhobi Ghat lacks a strong raison d'être. As Mumbai Diaries, it offers the usual snippets of the city’s monuments and life. The characters in the film are as clichéd as they can get. They live in predictable circumstances and do predictable things; even its denouement that is supposed to surprise, leaves no impact. A whole lot of footage is wasted in underlining mundane elements. The film moves at a lugubrious pace, which is further emphasized by its background score. The music comes across as a deliberate and cosmetic attempt to give the film a kind of gloomy ‘festival film’ touch and feel.
The film has a multiple-track narrative structure that again is an inspiration and a stupid thing to take up for a debutant. When you can tell a straightforward story, why go through the useless rigmarole of contriving something like this? Are you short on ideas and story material and enthusiasm that you have to play with the form and structure to impress the cognoscenti? Your ultra curious and over active brain should be flooding with ideas and images in fact.
Dhobi Ghat could have been the story of Munna alone. What new dimension of Mumbai existence did you explore by combining Yasmin’s undercooked story with it except adding a wee bit more of melancholia? Or else, you could have developed just the Arun - Yasmin story, which was interesting. Munna, Shai, and Arun’s story was sad enough to suit your gloomy cinematic temperament and sensibilities. It could have given you greater room to do full justice to the three characters and their relationships. It could have been an audience-friendly thing to do. Where did you get the idea that the more complex the structure, the greater is the value and relevance of your art? How much more amateurish can you get?
Stop watching ‘art film’ DVDs for God’s sake. They are not doing any good to you. You have started imitating them, like a whole lot of our new age filmmakers. They will kill the true artist in you and make you hard-headed. And make a note of it, almost 95% of the so-called ‘festival’ films are bad and pretentious and Dhobi Ghat is one of them. Too much of festival going can be very damaging sometimes. It can turn you into a junkie in search of non-existent cinematic metaphors in the works of the so-called masters. You have already produced a film like ‘Peepli Live’. That was a significant film, a true masterpiece. It stood out because the filmmaker had something really important to say. It was a sad but a heartfelt film. The deep conviction of the filmmaker could be sensed in its characterizations, cinematography, structure, and in every other way.
The casting of Dhobi Ghat is fine. The debutant actresses Kriti Malhotra and Monica Dogra are relaxed and natural. Pratiek is good too. Aamir performs badly. He has started working on his roles the way he trains in the gym. In one of the last few sequences after he discovers the background of Yasmin’s video letters, he does ridiculous things, and looks like a bad theatre actor doing those odd things that are supposed to show his sense of one does not know what. Is he shocked? Is he devastated? Is he sad? He looks hysterical and funny. The whole scene has been visualized badly. His scene with Shai in the morning after their night’s sexual encounter is badly written, directed, and performed.
In the entire 90-minute movie, there is just one significant cinematic moment -- the long shot in the alley where Munna’s silhouette is shown killing a rat.
Here is another free khullamkhulla advice to all debutant filmmakers. You must develop the capacity to question your own motives. ‘Why am I making the film?’ This is the first question to be asked. And if you get any other answer than ‘I have something important to say, that has not been said by anyone else’, abandon the project. The process should continue all through while writing the script and developing your characters. You should question the motives of your characters. If they don’t have one, give them one. And if they don’t represent anything extra-ordinary, drop them. Art is all about discovering the ‘extra-ordinary’ in the ordinary. An artist has that capacity. That is why he is restless, and is forever looking for new breakthroughs. He does not copy and replicate sensibilities. That is fakery.
RKS
