Bhram
Director: Pavan Kaul
Actors: Dino Morea, Sheetal Menon, Milind Soman
| A still from Bhram |
What interested me more than the title on this film's poster was the producer's name right over it.
Nari Hira is a sort of a living legend in my line of work, near-about journalism, as it were. Hicky's Bengal Gazette was Indian subcontinent's first printed newspaper. That English weekly, founded in 1779, was altogether a spicy tabloid that delighted in gossip stories, mainly about high and low officials of the East India Company. It may be unfair then to anoint anyone the father of Indian tabloid journalism (not even the mysterious Russi Karanjia, who passed away recently).
Yet, in the '70s, when mainline publications in India were largely revered for their gravitas, depth and dullness, Hira could be solely credited for making popular a national curiosity over which famous face was getting into whose knickers. This is much before soft smut became the staple for mainstream news. Hira is best known for his unabashed, catty magazine titles Stardust, Society, Showtime, and many others. This is his first feature film as producer.
The film is presciently called Bhram or Illusion, since much of the shoddiness you suffer here doesn't appear to have translated the screenwriter's imagination into an optical illusion called a film. The simplistic, linear story-line, I am somewhere certain, isn't what the filmmaker may have started out with. To a point that when you reach an over-the-top final scene, rightly shot on a hill-top, you seriously wonder why you'd wasted your time moving in circles thus far.
A positive outcome of a movie with a low budget such as this is at least it is set in Manali (besides Mumbai): a realistic, inspiring Indian location that pampered Indian directors seem to have little patience for these days (with the notable exception of Vishal Bhardwaj and Mani Ratnam of course).
The negative outcome of budget considerations on the other hand could well be the leading man Morea. The uneasiness of his screen manners, the fidgetiness of his diction makes you want to send the master performer (and many others here) back to an acting crash-course before they return to shoot (another film, obviously). This one needn't be shot again.
Morea plays younger brother to a doting Dev (Soman), and boyfriend to a sultry super-model (Menon). The elder brother is your archetype tycoon who announces multi-million-dollar joint venture deals when he's not picking up a young achievers' award or barking to clients on the phone, referring to himself in third-person. The super-model, when not snorting cocaine or fending off molesters in her industry, reads books from a small shelf in her living room. It's a misconception that models aren't intelligent, Morea says. True.
Anyway, the big-bro and the super-mod meet. He reminds her of the man who'd raped and murdered her sister, when she was a child. At some point, one of the characters brings up the question that may play on the audience's mind: Dev appears in news almost every day. Why hadn't she seen and thought of him before? Never mind.
The film then entirely centres on whether or not the deadly Dev, once Inder, now happy, rich and married, commit the crime many years ago. Everything else you would've seen in the film has little causal-effect relationship with the essential conflict.
The premise isn't terribly worrying. The vapour-thin plot is. It makes a Harold Robbins paperback seem high-brow literature.
Over years of having reporters snoop around boardrooms and bedrooms of the rich and famous, I am sure publisher Hira has been privy to truer and much juicier stories. I am surprised he chose this garbage instead. We're still waiting for the semi-fiction, classified ones
here is the link
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