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Amu, Shonali Bose’s debut film is
outstanding, reports Ervell E. Menezes
One may call it East-meets-West or diaspora or what you may (this genre), but their numbers are surely swelling though not their quality. But Amu, a first film by Shonali Bose, screened at the 7th International Film Festival, Mumbai is quite outstanding. When US-educated Kaju (Konkana Sen Sharma) comes to find her roots in her native India she, like Miss Quested in A Passage to India is looking for the real India. But when she says "I just feel I breathe differently when I’m in India" it is a step further and a wee bit pretentious. It sort of embarrasses her cousin and puts a young Indian collegian Kabir (Yashpal Sharma) off. "Here comes another deshi firang," he seems to say. But like the viewer, Kabir soon comes to know the honesty of that statement for Amu is not only trying to find out her roots but also her parentage. It is the generation gap that comes into play and though it is a respectable North Indian family in which Kaju is brought up they still want to hide the past and the past is enmeshed in the 1984 Sikh riots. After the initial repulsion Kabir is more than attracted to Amu because he finds that her family is hiding something from her. So, like investigative journalists both unearth facts that shed light on the past but is a cause of much embarrassment in the present. That she was adopted and her real name was Amu. Director Shonali Bose, who has studied filmmaking at the UCLA Film School, has come up with an excellent screenplay (she has later turned it into a novel) which unravels itself like the layers of an onion. Step by step, surprise by surprise, the viewer is taken to the core of the issue. How Sikhs were brutally murdered after Mrs Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Cleverly, this forgettable day in India’s history is related against the backdrop of another major blemish, the Gujarat riots of 2002. There is a reference to the dark glasses minister and the scenes of violence are well marshalled. All this while of course Kaju/Amu and Kabir are falling in love. Maturely handled, Amu is 102 minutes long and it provides an excellent portrait of an NRI Indian. Even the scene on the railway track when Amu sees a woman like an apparition is cleverly depicted. The only trite part is singing the Ganga song to the tune of Old Man River. How could they have thought of such a "disaster." ? Konkana Sen Sharma, the daughter of Aparna Sen, turns in a very fine performance often underplaying the part and she is brilliantly supported by Yashpal Sharma who may begin rather flippantly but warms up with the subject and is as good as Konkana by the end. And though there are a few good cameos, especially Brinda Karat as Kaju’s mother but it is the ambience that is so well captured and for this cinematographer, Lourdes Ambrose deserves special mention. All in all, an unusually good film, reliving a forgettable part of history.
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