Sunday, December 07, 2008

Indie cinema in India continues to rock!

Oye Lucky! is the latest indie movie in India that continues the very welcome trend of good independent cinema.

I personally thought that the director's earlier movie -- Khosla ka Ghosla -- packed more punch, primarily because it had a better ensemble cast, and there were more dimensions to it. Here, the story is loosely based on "Catch me if you can' plot line.

The only thing that made me think more about the movie and why I am posting it is the following. The movie had Paresh Rawal put in 3 independent characters, all completely unrelated to each other. When reading the reviews etc., I assumed it was a gimmick, kind of a creative license to let a great actor excel. But watching the movie, it didn't seem that way. I was wondering if there was a purpose to it.

My conclusion, to end the suspense, was that each of these characters was someone the lead protagonist perceived as a father figure, and hence saw the reflection of his father in them. So, of course, one of the characters is actually his father. All three characters, it seems, are the ones this character looks up to in some way, but is always eventually let down.

So may be there was a moral to the story that the director was leading to?

Even apart from this little puzzle in the movie, I thought the movie was relatively funny, though started to drag somewhere in the middle, and all the main actors did well. Especially impressive was the great snapshot of Delhi, its lingo, its absurdness.