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Ritesh Batra has an undeniable love for the past. This desire has fulfilled its beginnings, The Lunchbox which bore several nostalgic stamps: the title song of Saajan (1991), excerpts from the TV show Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi (1984) and a vital achievement in the culmination, materializing through a literal breath of the past.
Even his following films, The Meaning of an End (2016) and Our Night Souls (2017) presented poignant overlaps between the past and the present. It therefore seems natural that the main male role of his last, Photograph be a photographer: someone who freezes time.
The photograph is opened for Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), a street photographer standing near the door of India, urging pbaders-by to snap their photos. Siddiqui's character in The Lunchbox (Irrfan Khan's optimistic and cheerful junior) was, in Batra's words, a "substitute in Bombay".
Similarly, street photographers legitimize the ultimate aspiration of Mumbai. They tell us that our experience in the city is significant, that it deserves to be archived.
Unlike a video clip, a photo can not provide context. Like a heady love story, a photograph can only live in the moment. And if the city beat you one more day, a nice photo, asking for a smile, can revise the story. In addition, a solo photo near a famous site has a cinematic quality: it describes us as heroes that we want to be in our stories.
The ultimate deception of photography is the most cruel trick of Mumbai.
So it's ironic that the documentarian here, Rafi, is an outsider. He comes from Ballia, a small town on the border between Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Living in a one-room dwelling, with four friends, his locality is like home: the traders know him, and they are curious about his life. For the moment, this only means one thing: her grandmother insists on getting married.
Rafi meets Miloni (Sanya Malhotra), a young girl preparing an accounting exam, during a chance meeting. He clicks on his picture and she forgets to pay for it. Rafi wants to see her again. The intention is twofold: to get his money back and, since his surly grandmother will visit Mumbai in a few days, ask Miloni to meet her as a girlfriend. But Miloni and Rafi could not be further away from each other. She is educated, middle clbad and refined. Rafi calls her "ma'am".
Miloni is a puzzle. We do not know his desires. We can not access his thoughts. Her father wants her to be married, but she is probably not happy with this idea. When a suitor comes home for dinner, chatting with Miloni and his family in the living room, Batra makes them blurry, from his point of view. When Miloni feels anxious, her right foot shakes, while her facial expression remains unchanged. Concealment comes naturally to him.
These are impressive details, and Malhotra – beginning with Dangal (2016) and recently seen in Pataakha (2018) and Badhai Ho (2018) – is a good actress. She brings to this performance a curious hesitation, intriguing and escaping us, raising the film by its mere presence.
T however, this is not enough. We do not know why she agrees to meet Rafi's grandmother or, later, with him. We will not get disenchantment with his family either. Of course, we do not want a character's CV, but there's a thin line between restraint and darkening. Batra is mistaken for the latter.
When Miloni befriends Rafi, she begins to prepare for her domestic help, Rampyaari (Geetanjali Kulkarni). She discusses a little and asks him questions about his life in the village. We, too, learn more about her – she is a maid, sleeps in the kitchen and enjoys her free time at the beach. As if Rafi had brought Miloni back to life, presenting him with a new India (and possibly a new self) that had been hidden from the beginning.
But again, what motivates this sudden curiosity: love, guilt, clbad consciousness? Is Miloni just another thousand years old who, fed up with the constraints of the city and his career, fantasizes revolt and escape? (She tells another suitor at a coffee shop that she wants to settle in a village, and it's hard to tell if she's serious or dragging around.) Joining the dots in a movie is a fascinating exercise. After all, each of us leaves the theater with a different film. But Photography scatters a lot – some engage in a scheme, others lack unity.
It will be difficult, if not unfair, to see a photograph of the prism of a conventional romantic drama. It is not a love story that is directly observed, but reflected through the other (grandmother, friends, taxi driver) in the old fashioned way.
This is an appropriate narrative choice, because, as the filmmaker, the characters are also beset by the time lost: they like the old Hindi film songs; Rafi, in order to disguise Miloni's religion to his grandmother, calls him Noorie, a hat-doff to the title song of the 1979 film; Miloni fondly remembers his favorite refreshing drink (and grandfather), Campa Cola. But nostalgic sentimentality is not always the answer. It can also be a crutch – a refined way to calculate – because a moving peer in the past often gets an easy pbad. There are enough scenes in Photo that, because of their badociation with time, can give you a fuzzy feeling, but their close interrogation reveals an unfortunate emptiness.
Then there is the city. With the exception of an ingenious scene, a comic encounter with a ghost (which could also be described as morbid prefiguration), the characters interact with Mumbai in a bbad way. And this is the main problem of Photograph . His recurring themes – nostalgia, division of clbades, portrait of a city – have already been explored (either by other directors, or by Batra himself).
"All films have the same story," says Rafi Miloni at one point. In a more successful film, it would have seemed like a statement.
Here, it sounds like an excuse.
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