Think of a Hollywood 'ghost and vengeance movie'. Well, most probably it will be about someone wronged who dies and then comes back to kill those who wronged him or her.
Think of a Bollywood 'ghost and vengeance movie'. Well, this would be about two lovers who were not allowed to marry, or a woman who was assaulted and molested and finally committed suicide, and then comes back in the afterlife to avenge her death.
Both these concepts have one thing in common - the soul is always the tortured one, and the people are ones at fault. Well, if I tell you that there is a Bollywood movie that actually is different, what would you say? - I'd say 1920.
Cast:
- Rajneesh Duggal as Arjun Singh Rathod
- Adah Sharma as Lisa Singh Rathod
- Anjori Alagh as Gayatri Devi
- Raj Zutshi as the Priest
- Indraneil Sengupta as Mohan Kant, the British Indian armyman who betrayed his revolting pro-independence military regiment.
- Dilip Thadeshwar
- Amita Bishnoi
- Vipin Sharma as the caretaker of the haunted palace
- Sri Vallabh Vyas as the Doctor
- Amin Hajee as M.K., the head of the haunted palace
- Ashish Pradhan
- Rushitaa Pandya
- Smita Hai
- Rakhi Sawant in an item song Bichua
Plot:
1920 tells us the story of two lovers from different religions breaking the caste barrier and living in the Bombay of 1920. After some happy times together, the husband, who is an architect, is sent to a village in India, Palanpur for the reconstruction of a old castle into a grand hotel. Their life takes a turn for the worse in the castle, with the woman soon beginning to have weird experiences and is finally bed ridden one day, forcing the man to embark on a truth searching journey and winning his lady love back.
Review:
1920 cannot be considered to be a fresh concept from any angle, but it is interesting to see that the story writer has tried his level best to bring some spice to the common cut and dry 'good soul dies and has to take revenge' formula that has been prevalent in Bollywood since the times of Madhumati and Ramsay Brothers.
Simply put, the movie is old wine in new bottle, but the new bottle is quite classy, as well as the companion food is very novel and exciting. The two actors have do not much to write home about, but both show promise and can become actors in their own right if they make the right choices.
Adah Sharma as Lisa Singh Rathod of course gets the meatier of the roles and she performs it with elan. She is positively spooky in the horror sequences, but of course, that also depends a lot on the direction.
As a viewer, the highpoints of the movie are that the movie makers actually take an effort to say that a person getting possessed is not completely impossible, and that even mainstream religion has experienced possessions and exorcisms. It was refreshing to see a Catholic priest coming to the aid and not some "Nirankari Baba'.
Another interesting aspect was the inclusion of the Baphomet, which says that the film maker has actually done some research in the world of the occult. All in all, the movie did not look kiddish and made one actually think that something is amiss.
One another important scene is the one where the priest and the doctor argue and both come up with perfectly logical reasons for the behavior of the girl. It was very good that the director did not go overboard to oversimplify the fact that the protagonist stands between two choices - one of religion and the other of medical science.
The movie has one scene which you would find revolting, horrific or amusing, whichever trail your train takes - the scene where Lisa is eating a live animal, hunched like a cat. Of course, there is no explanation to this, but it'd be good if the story tellers had made an endeavor to tell us why a possessed soul would eat or eats dead animals.
The movie still depends on creaky furniture and impossible camera angles to give you the freaks, but one advantage that the movie has above all is that the castle is so huge that it is indeed spooky even in broad daylight, let alone the night time.
All in all, 1920 has given Bollywood its first badass soul. Let's see where it goes from here.
0 comments:
Post a Comment