Wednesday, May 28, 2008

MITHYA


VK runs for his life after seeing a gang shoot out first hand. He madly runs along what I think is the Mumbai marine drive in the dead of the night. The camera follows him all along till a bird flying above the sea catches its attention. I don’t know whether the camera man got lucky or it was graphic but I loved that shot. That particular bird (among many others) seemed to be fleeing and sharing the same trembling apprehension. Side kicked with a very nice background score by Sagar Desai, Mithiya then on keeps you hooked.

You have to give it to Ranvir Shorey .Desperation, helplessness, charm, oblivion, humor…. and what not, he has portrayed it all. This guy is going places. The other protagonists like Saurab Shukhla ,Naseerudin Shah ,Vinay Pathak, Iravathi mayadev,Neha Dhupia,Harsh Chaaya etc are given equally distributed screen life and do full justice to the black comedy.

I don’t know whether this movie can be put into any one of the commercial or parallel cinema slot. It is so realistic that you can touch the characters, at the same time utterly entertaining .It has no long-muahahaha dialogues before someone shoots down another, no superhuman heroes and no spy cameras conveniently popping up (remember Race!).

Director/writer Rajat Kapoor and co-writer Saurab Shukhla have taken the age old humshakal or the doppelganger concept and beaten clichés into shape.VK an aspiring actor shares his face with Raje an underworld don, whose rivals-Gavde (Naseerudin Shah) and Shetty (Saurabh Shukla) - seize him in order to carry out their master plan. They kill Raje and send a trained-in-captivity VK in his place.VK plays his part well. The aspiring actor got a role of a ‘lifetime’ alright but is terrified. Will the kahani-mein-twists aid his acting or lead to a tragic love story or both!

The rest is mystery… :P

Anoodha Kunnath