Filmworld
Roy': An intriguing journey that leads nowhere (Hindi Film Review)
By
By Subhash K JhaFilm: "Roy"; Cast: Arjun Rampal, Ranbir Kapoor, Jacqueline Fernandez;
Written and Directed by Vikramjit Singh; Rating: *** (3 stars)
Somewhere
long before the debutant director Vikramjit Singh’s tormented
characters find their nemesis, the beauteous Jacqueline Fernandez
playing an avant-garde filmmaker tells Arjun Rampal(playing a hatted,
smoke-shrouded bratty masala filmmaker) that when a story doesn’t seem
to be getting anywhere, it’s better to end it then and there.
Some
such thought crosses our minds repeatedly as we waltz and stumble along
Vikramjit Singh’s fascinating but frustrating exposition on the creator
and the muse.
"Roy" is an important but unfinished film. It
dares to define the uneasy relationship between the artiste an his
art....Or in this case, the masala movie-maker and his masala. Arjun’s
character Kabir Grewal is a contradiction of creativity. On one end, he
behaves as though his style and poise are redolent of an era that was
gone with the Lean(David, we mean). On the other hand, he makes the kind
of massy entertainers that make money but never get awards.
Ironically
Kabir’s brand of cinema is exactly what "Roy" is not. Moving away from
the norm, it creates a world where the filmmaker and his film become two
separate entities, the one feeding on the other with parasitical glee.
Our
hero Kabir is the kind of self-indulgent hedonist whose girlfriends are
numbered by the press.When the self-willed Ayesha refuses to become
No.23 in Kabir’s life, he’s challenged, intrigued, and actually defeated
by love.
It’s in showing how Kabir falls (in every sense of the
word) in love that the narrative gains its advantage and strength.
Discarding the droopy dimensions displayed in the first half, "Roy"
confidently shifts into the second, tragic and fulfilling movement where
we see Arjun get leaner and more gaunt, bearded and shattered as Ayesha
vanishes into London, leaving him to feel genuine heartbreak for first
time.
Something akin to what Ranbir Kapoor had experienced in
"Bachna Ae Haseenon" when Deeepika Padukone had dumped him. There was a
fabulous moment for Ranbir in that film when he catches himself by
surprise when he feels a teardrop on his cheeks.
In "Roy",
Arjun’s character gets no such moment of liberating catharsis. This is a
very European film in spirit. Cry babies and babes are not allowed. The
emotions are all bottled up by the main characters. There is never that
moment when the tears just flow out.
The tight-lipped approach, the film’s USP, is also its undoing.
While
we applaud the narrative’s refusal to give in to the schmaltzy, even in
Arjun character’s intermittent conversations with his dying father
(Anupam Kher), we also crave to see the characters lose their sterility,
to abandon the brittle wall they seem to have built around their
hearts, none more so than Ranbir Kapoor’s, ahem, "Roy" who is a stymied
enigma, a character frozen in time and space.
Perhaps that
explains why he spends most of his playing-time wearing the expression
that we’ve seen this brilliant actor wear when he is at a particularly
brainless press conference.
Jacqueline Fernandez wears even less.
If you know what I mean. Her expressions, or rather the lack of them,
are amply compensated by her dazzling good looks. For the rest, we can
tell her two characters apart by the colour of their lipstick.
Audaciously
she is saddled with two roles. Only the most daring who cast her in a
dual role.But then this is a film that dares to do the unthinkable. It
merges fantasy and reality without boundaries so that we are left
looking at either perception simultaneously, or both.
Arjun holds
the film together. He has the look of brooding intensity that the film
requires. The director uses his physical presence to create an alternate
reality, a figment of the writer’s imagination ignited by a man who
feeds on fantasy....that’s how we must define Rampal.
To
accentuate Arjun’s burnt-out character, the director shoots the film in
night colours, highlighting that state of the soul which better learn to
appreciate light if it doesn’t want to be trapped in darkness.
"Roy"
is an interesting amalgamation of sassy spirit and sexy looks. The
three good-looking characters constantly seem to suggest they mean more
than they say. There are lots of half-finished sentences hovering in the
narrative trying to find a resting-place in lives that know no respite
from desire.
Though they come together in only one sequence, Arjun and Ranbir play sharply and smartly against one another.
Shaded
in pastel colours and cloaked in a tender timbre, "Roy" undertakes an
intriguing journey where the real mocks the reel and the creator merges
into his creation. Finally,though, "Roy" leaves is with a sense of
betrayal and dissatisfaction. There should have been a more satisfactory
payoff at the end.
The four main characters never quite attain
the infinite immediacy of a film-within-film format that we saw played
out so strikingly in "The French Lieutenant’s Woman" or nearer home,
"Khamosh" and "Akaler Sandhane".
Perhaps the first-time director
should have attempted the complexities of this film after making five
other films. But the fact that he did attempt this film as his
directorial debut is admirable.