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mind of a returning NRI with quite the same sense of logical progression
and compassion.
Give me Swades any day. I have really had my fill of the
likes of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Pardes and
Aa Ab Laut Chalen. They were entertaining all right, but
they were manipulative, even myopic in the depiction of the East-West
cultural divide. Swades, refreshingly, does not blame the
US of A for India's ills.
Gowariker proves that docudrama-style realism can go hand in hand
with a reigning Bollywood megastar. He does a truly fabulous job
of a seemingly difficult task. If only he had contained the temptation
to replicate the length of Lagaan, Swades would have
been a bit of a masterpiece of contemporary Indian cinema. But,
for most parts, it doesn't fall short by much.
For sure, Swades lacks the high drama of Lagaan.
But that is not really a lacuna. It's a necessity. It is the subject,
not the predilections of the film-going masses, that determines
the pitch of Gowariker's film. The storyline is peopled with believable
men and women caught in real situations. The narrative style steers
clear of the pitfalls that usually plague a Mumbai film featuring
a megastar - no concessions are made to his screen image. And the
acting is of a consistently high quality.
In short, Swades takes Bollywood out of the rut of silly
NRI romances and mindless action flicks that it is currently trapped
in. The film's eventual box office fate will make no difference
to this assessment of its worth. If it fails, it would be more a
comment on the quality of the audience.
Swades proves that the director of the super-successful
Lagaan hasn't let the accolades cloud his judgment and feed
his greed. It is the first mainstream Hindi film in eons that dares
to travel into the heart of the darkness of rural India and comes
up with a simple and unflinchingly truthful, if somewhat lethargic,
narrative of rare incandescence. It meanders just a touch as if
to approximate the protagonist's confused state of mind.
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