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This is Shahrukh Khan's most authentic screen performance ever.
The superstar is completely shorn of his mannerisms and he makes
the most of the opportunity. Even the mother figure, played with
great skill by Ballal, is free from clichés.
Indeed, barring its inordinate length and occasionally preachy
passages, there is nothing in Swades that is Bollywood. In
a filmmaking climate dominated by profit-seeking weavers of fluffy
dreams, Gowariker's new film is a welcome respite: when did we last
see the real face of rural poverty in a Mumbai film?
Swades is not about nationalism at all. It has nothing to
do with an NRI's guilt-laden conscience either. If Dilwale Dulhaniya
Le Jayenge, Pardes and Aa Ab Laut Chalen extolled
Bharatiya sanskriti and ran down everything western, Swades
is only a genuine voyage of discovery for its hero, who careens
through the heart of India only to realize that the nation's enemy
lies within - within all of us. It lies in our minds and in our
beliefs. It lies in our outdated social structures.
But Swades isn't a typical cows-casteism-and-chaos drama
either. There is soul in Swades if not as much flair as in
Lagaan. It is an uplifting film. When a crowded train pulls
up at a nondescript railway station, Mohan encounters a poor boy
selling drinking water ay 25 paise per earthen glass. Since his
arrival in India, he hasn't touched anything but mineral water but
he buys a glass from the boy and drinks it. The water of his land,
like the nanny of his childhood, is his link with his roots and
he renews the connection without any undue song and dance.
In an earlier but longer sequence, Mohan, at the behest of Kaveriamma,
treks across the countryside in order to recover some pending dues
from a middle-aged man who tills a land owned by Geeta. He and his
family are on the verge of starvation. His plight embarrasses Mohan
and before he leaves, he hands over some money to the weaver-turned
farmer.
The emotions that Swades maps are raw, tangible, and delectably
free of mass- appeal manipulation. The film eschews theatrics except
when Mohan, in a Lagaan-like situation, helps the villagers
generate their own electricity and light a bulb that illuminates
another of the many authentic faces that Gowariker puts on screen
- a half-blind woman whose furrowed visage stretches into a smile
as the darkness is dispelled.
But Swades is different from Lagaan and it doesn't
end at this point. The climax has to play out in Mohan Bhargava's
mind. It does so with utmost subtlety.
Even the sequences shot inside a NASA flight centre are not presented
as grand moments - that would hardly have fitted into the film's
overall scheme. The sets designed by Nitin Desai are basic and functional
and the low-key technical attributes prevent any dilution of focus.
Gowariker puts the people bang in the middle of the action and carves
out a tale that would have made Bimal Roy proud. Cinema isn't dead
in Bollywood.
Saibal Chatterjee
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