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| Munna (Prateik) in Mumbai Diaries |
Encounter unbalanced
By John Esther
Overflowing with contrived encounters, writer-director Kiran Rao’s Mumbai Diaries intersects three people and their supporting milieus from various works and leisure(s) of life inhabiting the city of Mumbai, India.
Arun (Aamir Khan) is an artist low on talent and even lower on social graces, but that does not stop him from seducing art collectors and the likes of Shai (Monica Dogra), an American investment banker who has returned to her very rich Indian family’s home for a little sabbatical where she can dabble in photography. Connecting the two by more than one coincidental turn in this city of 14 million (the second most populous city in the world behind Shanghai) is Munna (Prateik), a washer man, who belongs, by definition, to a lower caste and, by cliche, a model boy from the other side of the tracks.
Shunned by Arun, Shai develops a relationship with Munna, but the relationship means something different to each of them. Meanwhile Arun has discovered some recorded materials that lead him to a dark secret about the fate of a former inhabitant in his current dwelling.
As each of them push to find her or his identity, they inevitably push others away.
Like many films one encounters in less significant film festivals, the heart of Rao’s drama is in the right place, but it tries to do too much with too little talent.
The film does not hide from the class differences and insurmountable obstacles it takes to rise above of one’s caste. While Shai and Arun sleep in comfort, Munna is out on the streets beating rats the way the local gang beats his family down. There is another sub plot about drug dealing, leading to more coincidental encounters.
In addition to the laughable times each of the characters intersect on the busy streets of Mumbai, the actors behind the often clumsy dialogue, come off amateurish, especially when the dialogue is in English. This is Dogra’s first film and it shows.
It also does not help that the direction in Rao’s first feature film fails for the most part. Shooting a scene from different angles for the sake of different angles does not flatter a film anymore than the numerous close-ups accentuating the poor dialogue and script. Perhaps nowhere is Rao’s direction misguided than her and director of photographer Tushar Kanti Ray’s metonymic movements over Arun’s paintings. Unflattering to Ravi Mandlik’s painting in the film, the attempt to show the fragments of an artist’s tortured soul – and, we are suppose to accept, the fragments of Mumbai -- unsuccessfully contradicts the direction during the rest of film.
Where Rao’s direction does succeed, often in surprising moments of clarity, is when the camera rolls along the streets of Mumbai, capturing people in their normal behavior. One pauper child demands money before demanding an image of her be recorded. Vast amounts of people on the streets carry out their menial tasks, noticed by no one, but the camera and the subsequent viewers behind it. Fictionalized or not, these minor moments seem to be the more authentic accounts of Mumbai minutiae.
