Posts

Showing posts from January, 2022

Thoughts on Shyam Singha Roy (2/2)

Image
S hyam Singha Roy - An Imperfect Reincarnation It is in the flashback portion where the film really takes an enormous leap in terms of its presentation. The storyline of  Shyam  and  Rosie’s  relationship is itself capable of an entire film (case in point Mani Ratnam’s   Dil Se ). Especially the Song and Dance sequences create a  Bhansali  style dance form choreography by  Kruthi Mahesh  and  Yeshwant . The Orffian Chants and Plaintive Veena (and a countless number of other traditional Hindustani Instruments) just cut through the ethereal silence in the temple as  Shyam  looks at a distance towards  (Maithreyi)  a dance formation being broken and again remade into another, and the song  Pranavaalaya  is sung. In a word, the songs in this movie, especially the ones in the flashback are unskippable for their layered audio-visual quality. But there are several bones to pick even in the resourceful second half. Resourceful because of - The  Bengali Revolutionist  set-up ( Nani  makes thi

Thoughts on Shyam Singha Roy (1/2)

Image
 S hyam Singha Roy – An Imperfect Reincarnation Nea rly an hour into the film, a Lie Detection Test is considered concrete enough just to bail out  Vasudev  Ghanta  – the upcoming film director. The camera takes a mid close up onto  Nani’s  face which shows a sliver of joy. The camera then rake focusses to the background where  Abhinav Gomatham  and  Krithi Shetty  burst in joy, taking the happiness a notch higher.    In that sliver of joy expression, you see for a second,   Nani  as an actor, conveying a genuine emotion with equal genuineness. But the camera doesn’t spend enough time on the actor’s face as it wants to capture the faces which show genuine emotion with exuberant faces – that of  Abhinav and Krithi . This small gesture from the filmmaking point of view was my first clue in what was the centre of imperfections in this  Nani’s  film.    Here’s my chain of thought. Why give such a wide-eyed, 1000 watt lighten smile at your hero? Is it because he was your  friend/boyfr