Movie Review: Barfi!

There is a point in the movie where Barfi, sitting in a store room, is carving Shruti’s name on a “Prestige Pressure Cooker” (jo apni biwi se kare pyaar, wo prestige se kaise kare inkaar), and he notices her inside the shop. As he tries to confirm, the camera pans and moves from blinds to blinds till Barfi is sure. Shruti Sengupta looks like a Bengali baudi should, and Barfi approaches her. But stops, and takes out his comb and gets his appearance right. He tries to whistle but obviously, he doesn’t know that his whistle is silent. And then Shruti turns around. They make eye contact and Shruti goes through a series of conflicting emotions interrupted by the honking of her husband Ranjit, and Barfi carries the pressure cooker for her to outside the shop – that 90-120 second montage of emotions – that’s poetry. And that’s Barfi – four cheese fondue – dipped in four of the nine rasas – shringar, hasya, karuna, and adbhut.

The theatre erupts, holds its breath, sighs, and (almost) cries with Barfi. It amuses you, and keeps you smiling throughout. It makes you draw parallels with several things without ever slowing down so much so that you start caring about the parallel more than you care about Barfi. It tries to be a thriller in the middle, and while you cringe about the villain being too much of a villain, it finds the hero inside them as well.

The music blends so beautifully that you almost don’t notice it. The lyrics are poetic and situational. The sound is Darjeeling. Remember the fresh feel of kashto maza from Parineeta. Barfi’s soundtrack is made up of quite a few of those light in the middle and effervescent at the outside poignant songs. In fact, as discussed offline, the soundtrack sounds more like Shantanu Moitra than Pritam.

The tragedy is never overplayed, nor the deformities. The lack of dialogues does not bother you. Ileana’s voiceover is a good supplement, administered as required. And it’s not soppy to the point where you feel like it’s a rooting for the underdog movie. The screenplay is tight and lucid, even though it gets into a two-three layered flashback at certain points.

While it is brutal to compare it to “The Artist”, but the artist of this movie, while imitating Chaplin and Rowan Atkinson, has left a searing imprint on bollywood. Ranbir Kapoor is brilliant. Make that – BRILLIANT. I won’t analyze further.

Special mention for Ileana who is breathtakingly beautiful without looking unreal, Priyanka who’s making half the industry wonder how did she pull this one off. The world’s wondering what might have happened had she pulled off What’s Your Rashee and Saat Khoon Maaf in a similar fashion. She does go overboard a few times, but is, on the overall, very very good.

Anurag Basu has figured out that the three musicians (three blind mice?) in the background are his lucky charm. They were there in Life in a Metro, and they’re here too. He indulges himself. Not just once. But you will forgive him for that. For many of my generation, the throwback on the eighties and nineties is nice, albeit exaggerated. And thankfully, it’s a prop, and not the point.

The movie, in a very Masand like preachiness, is not without its flaws. It runs longer than it should, and there are stretches where you would want to gloss over rather than go through it again and again. But then, which classic have you read where there aren’t a few pages of creative self indulgence! There are times when Barfi’s Chaplin moments could have been snipped out, but then, they keep the theater light as well. It’s almost sad to see Ashish Vidyarthi becoming a shadow of what he could have been, but then, it wasn’t a movie for him. Biggest gripe I have is – Ileana does not speak Hindi the way Bongs would. While it probably does not matter, but with so much of the region thrown in here and there juts for the flavor, it would have helped to get some of those details right (the way Kahanii did). Saurabh Shukla is good, but then again, the region is missing from the dialect. Considering that he and Ileana have most of the dialogues in the movie, it would have been good to have. The level of detailing leaves a lot, but that’s not going to be a complaint you carry as you leave the theater.

Some of the emotions are left unexplained. And that’s good. I won’t tell you which ones.

By the way, I do think that an older Ranbir will look exactly as he’s shown in the movie. And Ileana looks so gracefully old. Good job by the makeup artists for not turning them into caricatures.

Endnote: Lovely movie. A 9 on 10. When you come out, you stay silent, and in your zone for a bit. And that zone is a happy place. So, please watch it.