The Period Piece-II

J.Bo on Kisna So what's the point Mr Ghai?

I watched the film yesterday with an audience that was interactive. People began responding to the dialogues. This was mofussil behaviour in a slick multiplex. Then I realised why! Those poor guys had spent Rs 150 each and they were entertaining themselves for Kisna had failed to do that after the first 30 minutes of awe-inspiring visuals.

It was shock all the way. In fact whenever the audience fell silent, I was uneasy. In normal circumstances I don't like interruptions in my movies, and here I was yearning for some baby to cry, some cellphone to ring. Everything, but the movie, was a blockbuster.

I read the reviews today morning. It was heartening to see all of them panning it. But most reviews did agree that Subhash Ghai handled the period part well. Much has been already said about the period perfections Subhash Ghai has achieved in this otherwise not so perfect film. Here are a couple of not so perfect moments. Period.

1. Two Gypsies (Maruti Suzuki Gypsy Kings to be precise) flank Rajpath as the Rashtrapati Bhavan (then Viceregal Lodge) vista fills the screen, timeline 1947 in place. Vintage Maruti?

2. A riot-hit Ghaziabad in 1947 has posters of Dushman and other sundry films released decades after Independence.

3. The mujra by Sushmita Sen is hardly a period mujra and the chorus is from the 1990s.

4. The great Indian rope dance trick is too modern to belong to a period piece. Isha Sharwani and her mother Daksha Seth have made this recent dance form popular recently. But Mr Ghai had Isha so he hung (or shall we say hanged, coz her debut is a disaster) her to the rope in 1947.

5. The dialogues are not from that period. In fact the dialogues are not from any period. They are from the book title How Not To Write Dialogues. The transition from pure Sanskrit-based Hindi to a complex Urdu in one sentence is no mean feat. Only that humans have never spoken that kind of khichdi in known history.


Period, huh?
In many tribal cultures, a girl's nether regions are exposed to smoke of neem leaves before the first night with her husband. The girl is normally made to stand above an angeethi with her feet on each side of the slow-burning leaves. In some tribal cultures it's practised every time a girl has her period. The neem smoke is supposed to purify the body. Isha Sharwani does that squatting on a rope that hangs from a tree with fires burning beneath. And it's not before her first night for sure. Maybe that's why they called it a period drama.

(Part-I is not related to Kisna and belongs to JBM)