From Vikramaditya Motwane and
Anurag Kashyap. The guys who brought us the stunning Udaan. What could go wrong? Lootera
is a masterclass in lighting and blocking a scene, a tremendous display of artistry,
craft and detailing. It’s a grand, beautiful looking film that constantly gives
you hope that it will come up with something sweeping to say. Sadly it’s far
from the film that you would expect it to be considering the talent involved. It
is lyrical, twee, gritty, romantic, poignant. Lootera is a lot of things, but
mostly it’s a failure. An ambitious one for sure, but a failure.
Directed with admirable dedication
by Motwane, the film vaults like a skier across the slippery terrain of the Dalhousie Himalayas. It’s a film that wants you
to register an emotional response instead of an intellectual one - on a scale
of 1 to Mills and Boon, Lootera falls
right around Nicholas Sparks territory. Hopefully Motwane recognizes this
because the plot is ridiculous, and even as a romantic tear jerker that requests
your suspension of disbelief to part ways with you, the film is simply pretty
but uninvolving. There is Amit Trivedi’s exquisite music to keep the atmosphere intact but it only serves as
window-dressing to a film that is at best unmemorable and inconsequential.
Lootera might have worked had there been a semblance of chemistry
between its stars Ranveer Singh and Sonakshi Sinha, but there isn’t. It makes the
movie a hollow, soulless watch. I felt nothing watching the film. Neither love,
nor hate. Nothing. The protagonists of Lootera
are in desperate need of a glass of decaf, and a human being for the lead actor
rather than a gormless stand-in. Throughout the film Ranveer has two basic
expressions – grim, and grim with a stubble. Sonakshi is not bad, a far cry
from the terrible 100 cr films she has appeared in, but she’s always pained,
always looking tragically sad, with her under eye dark circle makeup doing all
the requisite acting. I’d trade every last morsel of the pretty artwork, old
world charm and period detailing for a single moment of authentic emotion from
these characters.
The story is full of romantic
pronouncements that translate to a film that is neither believable nor enchanting.
That Motwane and screenwriter Bhavani Iyer chose to adapt O Henry’s The Last Leaf needn’t have been the kiss
of death, but it set up its own set of problems. These start with improbable
plot devices which attempt to be masked by the wonderful period setting. They’re
compounded by a screenplay that can’t establish why two lovers would remain
together despite one of them completely ruining the other’s life. The crucial scene
set years later when the two lead characters meet again lacks the overwhelming
feeling that these two people are star-crossed lovers meant to be together. There
is no clarity at all about whether the hero Varun is a villain, a good villain
or simply misdirected, because none of his shifts in behavior are properly established.
So when he takes a massive U-turn in the second half, going against everything
he has done in life in a matter of two minutes, it is jarringly unconvincing. And
there's no real suspense – Motwane is so deadly earnest about the ‘power of love’
that you’re left to simply twiddle your thumbs and wait for the inevitable. The
abruptness of the second half as it leaps from an obscure chase scene in the
bizarrely isolated town of Dalhousie is unsettling, revealing that either
Motwane had a five hour rough cut or he just didn't know where to take a stand
with his film's focal point.
That said, you can’t deny Motwane
the credit for rising above the tackiness and schmaltz found in mainstream Bollywood
- the cinematic flair of someone like Sanjay Leela Bhansali is applied by a waxy
sopping wet sugar coated roller, but Motwane in Lootera applies it by obsessive compulsively perfect paint strokes.
Even if the climax is a corny beast of sentimental claptrap. Given the cloying,
saccharine premise, this is probably the best possible film that could be made.
While the leads are mostly
vacuous, and Arif Zakaria and Adil Hussain have perfunctory roles, there's one
performer in Lootera who looks
completely at ease with what he's doing – Barun Chanda, who plays the father of
Sonakshi’s character. The man is terrific, and it is cringe inducing to later
see Divya Dutta who has precisely one line of dialogue and serves absolutely no
purpose in the film. Two or three individual sequences, like the scene leading
up to the interval, juxtaposed with Trivedi’s BGM are well done, but they can’t
hold the movie together. The specter of what Lootera might have been comes to the forefront during these scenes when
Motwane briefly looks like he’s going to breathe life into the sentimental
slushy hogwash of its source material. Unfortunately he must have realized he
couldn’t pull it off, and stops short of going the extra mile. Too bad, because
Lootera could have been something
more than the forgettable and unpersuasive stopover that it ultimately is.
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