Saturday, August 11, 2007

Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda

Just finished watching this movie. Hobbes usually has full control of our Netflix queue, but he hasn't been feeling well, and in his feverish delirium, he agreed to let me add some movies and move them to the top :)

SKSG (Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda) brought back memories of the many Sunday evenings and afternoons spent in front of the telly. I was a kid then, and like everyone else around me, more or less hated these artsy movies. Watched them nevertheless, since the pull of the "Sunday feature film" was so strong. Having grown up and seen many, many more movies now (thanks to Hobbes), I can truly appreciate some of the gems that I saw then. Watching SKSG was an attempt at realizing it's true worth.

The story was fairly straightforward. There were only a handful of characters, and they were portrayed quite naturally and, were developed very well. The plot was simple and easy to follow. (Compare this to Marte Dam Tak, which I watched last week. There were so many characters and sub-plots that I was totally lost and utterly confused within 30 minutes of the start of the movie.) That is not to say that the characters themselves were simple. They were complex and had shades of gray. More than anything, they were normal human beings who could be selfish and self centered at times.

I loved the locations and the sets! There were no exotic locales, no designer inspired homes and no awe-inspiring landscapes. Everything looked in its rightful place. The broken windows, the dirty, narrow lanes, the tiny homes, the shared terraces - again, extremely nostalgic.

I don't know anything about camera work or cinematography, but I liked the fact that most frames had very shallow depth of field. In most of the scenes, only one or two characters filled the whole frame and were in focus, while the rest was blurred. The signal to noise ratio was pretty high and that made my brain happy :) There wasn't extraneous background information to process.

I was surprised to hear Pallavi Joshi and Rajit Kapoor break into a song (I believe it was sung by Udit Narayan and Kavita Krishnamurthy) in the middle of their conversation. The song was below-average and seemed out of place. I would say this was the only negative thing about the movie.

All in all, a weekend afternoon well spent!