A village without an address

Lakhia's MSAMD delivers an utterly messy, naive and meaningless melodrama about a lowly city boy, says Saibal Chatterjee.

The distance between intention and achievement can often be a yawning chasm. What debutant director Apoorva Lakhia had set out to do with Mumbai Se Aaya Mera Dost - take popular Hindi cinema back to a rural setting a la Lagaan - cannot be faulted. But what he has delivered has fallen way, way short of expectations.

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MSAMD certainly isn't headed for the hallowed Lagaan zone. The village created by Lakhia simply doesn't have the mystique that could make it a part of Bollywood folklore. It is destined to drop off the map. Its ersatz feel stems from the lack of a precise context. But for the colourful turbans some of the male characters don it would be difficult to tell that the film is set in a part of Rajasthan. And as far as dramatic impact goes, MSAMD is as barren as the desert location itself.

Both MSAMD and Lagaan are set in a remote Indian village, but the similarity ends there. In Lagaan, the turn of the century central India village, created with an unerring eye for period and location detail in Bhuj, Gujarat, had a life and logic of its own. In contrast, the hamlet that lies at the centre of Lakhia's maiden film never ever springs to life. It remains a mere backdrop; it does not percolate into the heart of the drama. That is why the film goes horribly wrong.

Even within the more facile mainstream format, Hindi cinema has often done a fine job of etching out the cultural nuances inherent in a regionalized narrative. Films like Mother India, Sholay, Deewar, Lagaan, even Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, spring to mind. Indeed, some of the biggest blockbusters produced in Mumbai over the decades have been films that have had a clear sense of space and time.

While Lakhia seeks to emulate a well-established tradition, his film doesn't quite measure up to the challenge, proving yet again exactly how difficult it can be to pull off the act of telling a culture-specific tale well. If handled with passion and empathy, a culture-specific theme can yield a timeless classic. But it could just as easily prove to be a recipe for unmitigated disaster - as it does in the case of MSAMD - if it is divorced from an intrinsic feel for the material.

Quite apart from the fact that Lakhia's film is burdened with an extremely shoddy script - neither the setting nor the characters are fleshed out with the requisite degree of coherence - the latest Abhishek Bachchan starrer makes a complete hash of articulating its real intentions. It promises to be substantially different from the general run of commercial Hindi films. In reality, it is as superficial and hackneyed as any Hindi potboiler you would ever see.

Lakhia's idea seems to be to unravel what satellite television can do to a village that has only just been exposed to something as basic as electricity. But all that MSAMD manages to do is to deliver an utterly messy, naive and meaningless melodrama about a lowly city boy who dares to fall in love with the tyrannical village thakur's décolletage-flashing little sister.

Lagaan worked because it had a fabulous script. The characters, despite their daunting multiplicity, were all vivid portraits of humanity. The drama, despite the audacious premise on which it rested, was universal - and believable. In MSAMD, the characters (even the lead actors) are no more than cardboard caricatures. Especially fuzzy is the figure of the hero's boyhood chum, played by Aditya Lakhia, who flits in and out of the frame without too much rhyme or reason.

Could the fault lie in the fact that Lakhia has travelled all the way from rarefied Hollywood - he is reported to have worked with the likes of Woody Allen and Ang Lee - to the heat and dust of rural Rajasthan? It couldn't have been an easy transition and it shows. Understanding a locale and its peculiar concerns is of paramount importance when a Mumbai filmmaker ventures beyond the relative safety of formula-ridden urban themes and candy floss fantasy.

The career of Prakash Jha best illustrates that. He has been at his best when he has tackled politically inflected subjects that have sprung from his roots. His best films, Damul and Mrityudand, are both set in Bihar, as is his upcoming Gangaajal. Jha's success rate with films that are removed from his own socio-cultural universe - Bandish, Dil Kya Kare and Rahul - hasn't been particularly encouraging.

Much the same fate has stalked the enormously gifted Ketan Mehta, once hailed globally as one of India's most promising filmmakers. His fame had back then hinged on films like Holi, Bhavni Bhavai and Mirch Masala, tales of searing intensity and marvellous inventiveness. It has been downhill since then - a slide represented by films like Hero Hiralal, Oh Darling Yeh Hai India and Aar Ya Paar. Culturally ungrounded masala films are clearly not Mehta's forte.

All is not lost for Lakhia. He could surely learn a thing or two from the likes of Jha and Mehta and put them into practice the next time he goes behind a camera. No matter how muddled MSAMD has turned to be, it would be sad if he threw in the towel and sought an escape route through masala movies. His time will come if he sticks to his beliefs while honing his scripting and directorial skills. He could find a far better village the next time around.