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Hindi film Review
Strings
Review :
'Strings', an exercise in vapidity
By Subhash K. Jha, Indo-Asian News Service Rating:
Film: "Strings"; Cast: Adam Bedi, Sandhya Mridul, Vineet Kumar and Tannishtha Chatterjee; Director: Sanjay Jha
Good intentions often don't translate into cinema of true worth. Sanjay Jha's "Strings" takes its young protagonist Warren Hastings (Adam Bedi) through a voyage into the mythic spirituality of the Hindu ethos.
The journey is at the most a half-baked vapid attempt to capture the chants and visuals of the Kumbh Mela in a presentable package.
The film fails miserably in keeping the faith alive. It instead strangulates the most cherished aspects of the Hindu religion, turns it ineffectual and weans our attention to scenes that are woven into awkward pastiches of spirituality.
Jha's film is like a pilgrimage to a holy place from where the gods have fled. God-forsaken and utterly devoid of any robustness, "Strings" is like a vapid fling with feelings with which the director doesn't know how to get connected.
Jha relegates the rhythms of religion to the exposition of the aromas of the 'agarbatti' joss sticks and the screech of the conch shell.
Alas, the scent of the incense incenses. The spiritual reality that Jha courts is a comic-book existentialism seen through the eyes of a tourist (Adam) who thinks the 'soul' of Hinduism lies in the eyes of the temple belle whom he courts, while another female companion (Sandhya Mridul as feisty as ever) fumes over the growing relationship between the two.
The namby-pamby voyage of the doped has Adam moving in with a priest (Vineeth Kumar) and his daughter (Tannishtha Chatterjee). The story of the 'gora' British guest and the chirpy priest's daughter is so hackneyed that the film could qualify as the stalest spiritual search since the invention of time.
The 90-minute exercise in utter futility is further encumbered by a couple of poorly choreographed music video-style songs which are meant to reveal the gay abandon of souls finding their metier in the melee of religiosity.
Rajeev Shrivastava captures the sights and sounds of the Kumbh Mela with brave lenses. But there is nothing to capture here beyond the heaves and lurches of characters who seem to have been put in the religious milieu only because the director wanted to undertake an expedition into exotica.
Jha could have spared himself and the audience the ordeal. The performers try hard to smother their giggles in a masquerade of sobriety.
But you can't fight the inevitable. By the time the priest's perky daughter says, 'I do' to the effeminate Britisher (whose accent keeps slipping into a Yankee twang) the narrative has gone into a stage of advanced torpidity.
Tragic waste of time and space.
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