SOUNDTRACK
(PVR Saket, Delhi, and other theatres)
In the season of remakes this is one more. The inspiration has come from an independent Canadian film, It's All Gone Pete Tong , where a popular DJ goes deaf because sound becomes an occupational hazard for him. First-time director Neerav Ghosh tries to Indianise the idea and succeeds in creating the atmospherics and the texture despite the fact that there is no rock scene of consequence in the country.
Rajeev Khandelwal plays a small town boy, Raunaq Arya, who comes to Mumbai to make it big in the world of music. The opening sequence, where Raunaq finds melody in the mundane, catches the eye. With booze oozing out of his veins, Raunaq captures the console at a night club deliciously called Tango Charlie.
The cocktail of music, drugs and sex that Ghosh has created to depict the rise and fall of Raunaq is heady and Medieval Punditz's music provides it the authenticity and originality that the script demands to believe in the eccentricity of Raunaq, who brings home a beggar to record his first hit.
So is the mockumentary format that Ghosh has copied from the original. The biopic style keeps the audience eager about how far Raunaq will go with his quirks. Usual suspects like Anurag Kashyap and DJ Aqeel, who patronise such attempts, make short, interesting appearances breaking the fourth wall, helping fact merge with fiction in the process.
However, the way Raunaq has handled Raunaq's alter ego is rather amateurish and bursts the bubble midway. In an attempt to create the nostalgia of Johny Joker, yes, the Shweta Shetty song, Ghosh has got carried away. Also, he could not fully justify Raunaq's stature in the industry so that we felt the thud of his fall. After all he loses his capacity to hear even before his first big project. So when he tries to present him as modern day Beethoven, it is hard to digest. But to be fair to the debutant, he doesn't have the star and the scale to work with.
Ghosh recovers in the scenes when Raunaq decides to shun his audacious ways and embraces reality with a smile on his face, courtesy a born-deaf girl, Gauri, who knows how to speak. Soha Ali Khan plays this part with conviction. Ghosh makes her modulate her voice to make her sound as real as a mainstream Hindi film can afford to show a person who has learnt speaking by reading people's lips and she has a done a balanced job as Gauri could have easily become a caricature.
We know Rajeev has the cocksure attitude that Raunaq demands, but the way he bonds with Soha in the second half shows how he has matured as an actor.
It is not an original piece of work, but definitely an effort in the right direction.
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-newdelhi/article2522436.ece
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