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Cast:
Simran Vaid, Rohini Hattangadi, Paramveer,
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Ashish Duggal |
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Year:
2008 |
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Music:
Sandarbh |
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Lyrics:
Sandarbh |
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Director:
Mohan Sharma |
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Rounding
up all strugglers who could be found, making them sit in a
coffee shop and then going hunting for a script is not the
best way to make a movie, but this is what Mohan Sharma
seems to have done with '26th July at Barista'.
Amazing,
that nobody before Sharma (and his writer Rahil Qazi) saw
the potential of making a movie with July 26 (the day Mumbai
was flooded after a deluge of rain, and many people lost
their lives) as a backdrop, and what a pity the film turns
out to be. If there were any people in the cinema hall at
all, it must have been because they had nothing better to do
or they remembered that day of horror and wanted to see what
the filmmaker had done with it. |
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After the mandatory voiceover, Sharma collects a
rather clueless bunch of random people at a coffee
shop, with kind and helpful staff (the likes of
which this reviewer has never encountered at
Barista!). You don't know what hour of the day it
is, presumably late afternoon, by which time the
city was already deep under water; but some people
walk in and out, as if nothing happened, and some
look terror-struck.
There's a worried Sikh couple, waiting for their
kids' news,
who went for a picnic, a film writer,
a
struggler, two singles |
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looking
for love, some others, who wander away never to be seen
again. The struggler sits like a statue in corner with her
legs crossed, the Sikh woman wails sporadically, the writer
glares at everyone, and the singles alternately flirt with
each other or try to help others caught in the downpour.
At some point the power goes off, but since they couldn't
shoot in the dark, an urchin drops by a cache of fat
candles, because, as he says, his life is in the dark. 'Oh,
and you still spread light,' says someone. |
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Absurdly, a cop strolls in to investigate a robbery
in a bank next door and terrorizes everyone; a
gang-rape victim comes in sobbing to express concern
for the men who did it, because she has AIDS! And so
on. everything about the film so laughably inept. As
a break from the bunch of unknowns, he casts Rohini
Hattangady, Raju Kher and Amita Nangia getting a
scene each. And then the film ends as abruptly as
it started, with none of the stories getting any
closure.
The trauma Mumbai went through in the monsoon of
2005 deserved a much better film, but where are all
Bollywood's |
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self-proclaimed auteur when you need them? |
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