Barah Aana: A Viewing Experience to Reveal Deep Cultural Woes review

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Once deciding to type out the thoughts on Barah Aana, I was faced with a new predicament. Dearcinema has already hosted three reviews on the film; could I possibly add anything more fruitful? And then I decided to type out more of the cultural experience and less of the film in general; so readers, this is more of a rambling, of thoughts, rather than an actual review.

The adeptness of Mumbai cinema towards the handling of the downtown city life; the squatters and the chawal-dwellers, the hopes, desires, aspirations and angst of the "aam admi" (common man), the city in general in all its dailyness without relocating to swanky flyovers and colour-toned sunsets and rains; brings in comparison with our regular Bengali fare. That huge budgets or inane pedagogy, blue-toned rain-swept streets or wine-tipped Rabindrasangeets are mere byplays of pretension, and in no way contribute to a one and half hour of sitting, sinking, enjoying and reliving later, are revelations that our Bengali cinema could do with. But woe... and let's not dwell on it, the debates are antaheen (endless) ...

The humour, the subtlety and the ring of truthfulness runs through the entire narrative along with moments that mark the film apart from its tendency to veer too close to Hera-Pheri and other early Priyadarshan films. One was Aman's (Arjun Mathur) flings with the women, where neither his relation with the Italian nor the slum-belle are fully established. The Italian's background is not revealed, nor does the relation with Tanistha Chatterjee reach a closure. And that enhances the ring of truthfulness. This is a narrative of the three chawal-mates, their perspectives. Love and women appear as infatuations with bliss in a bleak horizon, normally to fade but definitely without a concrete characterization.

The other is the climax. The moment of Vijay Raaz's apparent treachery speaks volumes of compassion with human nature; where a lifetime of deprivation and insults in contemporary life hardly brings about communitarian solidarity but serves more as an impetus to hone personal survival instincts. This startling individualism runs through the narrative; the three can hang together only when an endeavour helps all three equally, an inkling of personal vendetta would make the others fall out.

Yet, how successful can this film be? If, even in these times we talk of success of a film less in terms of revenue generation and more in terms of getting its message across? In a multiplex for the first time in my life, it was a strange cultural experience to watch a film speaking of the daily mental oppression and disintegration of the deprived "service industry" by a society which fits in bills of thousands for a pizza dinner yet speaks of financial difficulties in the times of recession when asked for an aid by its security man for the treatment of its sick child. Sitting in the midst (and being a part) of the very oppressors, where each moment of deprivation is greeted with guffaws of smirk and laughter from the adjacent row at the facial expressions of Vijay Raaz. Was this supposed to be a comedy? Maybe it is after all, a farcical satire of which we are a part of.