The intrium around Rahat Kazmi’s Lihaaf has been high since his posters. Who doesn’t want to watch ISMAT Chugtai burner literature come to life on the big screen? This film looks luxurious, yes, but tendentious? Not so much, as revealed in the Kolkata 25 International Film Festival screening, which recently concluded.
The short story Chugtai is plentiful – the urgent need to reveal brutal truth through beautiful metaphors:
It is an hour Kazmi, 25-minute adaptation down, even though it remains very loyal to the source material. The film alternates between two parallel lanes. With a championship for writing Lihaaf, and the second is the dramatization of the short story itself.
The weight tells the former fall right on Chatterjee, but the shoulder is weak. A person can feel the despernisha longing to sink his teeth into his character’s temperament. Only to be a return to the weak scenario forged with weak and inconsistent dialogue. He is supporting actions featured Kazmi in her husband Shahid Latif. And Shoaib Shah as Saadat Hasan Manto, tired and insincerely on the worst.
Revealed the courtroom drama at a very elective pace. Almost antithetically drowned electrical tensions flowing through the story of Chugtai. Which was told in a parallel path with Anushka Sen in the lead role of a young Ismat. And Sonal Sahal played Enigma, Begum Jaan.
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The story of young Ismat, who finds ‘elephants in the room’. Squatting under the bugu blanket, is a visual carnival dipped in the colour of honey from gold.
Sonal Sehgal looks as far as the queen is sick and confused – the actual container for love and human touch. As a young Ismat, Anushka Sen seems to have been captivated and feared by Begum. With Rabbo (played by Namita Lal) overshadowing him every step through the royal corridor.
Individually, the actors seemed comfortable in this strange ivory tower from whisper sounds.
When they interact, the inconvenience shows, almost ironically fostering. The very most important discomfort and claustrophobia, sustain the story and each character.
This, maybe, it can be associated with a lack of striking chemical between the leading players. In a scene where it reads, the episode of erotica to Rabbo – massage and lover. The movement is awkward and not synchronous. There was a stiffness seen in the way Rabbo’s hand slid on his lover’s back.
When the latter exploded into giggling on reading the lines of making love. The passion on the screen is a thunderous performance, almost aware of the camera. It fails to do justice for love born of heartbreaking despair. That is very dangerous on the very edge while becoming therapeutic and meditation.
But regardless of all its limitations, the triangle world of Begum Jaan, Rabbo. And a young Ismat is much more interesting. Then those inhabited by the Grown-up Chatterjee people in the conflict of rice fields.
Someone will go as far as guessing that maybe Lihaaf will have a better fate. Without this track because it only tends to slow down. And weigh the film that is almost one and a half hours.
Mir Sarwar, Nawab Sahib, almost did not make an impression:
Although in an important role that encouraged same-s*x relationships in the story. Someone was almost forced to draw a parallel with the film Deepa Mehta 1996. Fire – also based on loose in the same story.
Where Nawabs equivalent which essay by Kulbhushan Kharbanda. And Javed Jaffrey left the suffering bowel with distilled horror. Nawab is not required to play villain diverse parks here, agree. But at least his indifference to his wife. Which he left like a collection – should not look like boredom, which, unfortunately.
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While Lihaaf nailed visual grammar, dedicated full attention to every authentic detail. From the seal on the envelope to the Sun-colored rainbow filtering in through the glass of the palace glass. Not a little to fill the void left by half-half a scenario.