Yudham sei

Why should one have friends? Of all the reasons I could imagine, the best that strikes me is that they will buy you the tickets for a movie on any given weekend. Topping it up with crunchy pop corn and icy cool drinks. What else does one need in life? :-). As a consequence I had a chance to watch "Yudham sei"; the latest flick from the staple of Myshkin.

The movie is a dark take on the sexual abuse and exploitation, the twin shackles today's teenage girls are fettered with. The director adds elements of mystery, drama, and tragedy in this crime investigation narrative and fairly succeeds in holding audience's attention for the major part of the movie. This movie appears to take off where his earlier film "Anjadhey" had left and in my opinion this could easily be called as "Anjadhey-2".

In my opinion Myshkin can be Kollywood's Anurag Kashyap. Anurag who is an acclaimed bollywood filmmaker reminisces one of his experiences with the censor board during the certification of his recent film "The woman in yellow boots" which as you might have guessed is again a dark movie with sexual overtones and wide use of expletives. He says that one of the censor board persons had asked him to get his mind checked for only a disturbed person can make this kind of movie. In the same breath he also says that when the movie was screened in an European country (the name I forgot)one filmmaker had actually asked him why the movie was so subdued and why had he made the film so polished despite the content being so raw.That's how our Myshkin too has treated this film.

If movie is a way to let people know something, then Myshkin surely lets us know that he is angry. Very angry over the way women are treated in our society. How decency and virtue are crushed under the juggernaut of power, corruption and muscle power. This movie though looks like a crime thriller on the outset the director emphasises on the emotional turmoil of the investigator the subject of investigation throughout the movie. All his usual touches like low angle shots, scene establishment through the movement of the feet, low light shots, wide angle shots, scenes sans dialogues etc, all are present. These make him one among the directors whom one can guess by just watching a few scenes in his movie. The performances especially that of the character "Judas", the police inspectors are top notch. In one scene Judas actually looks directly into the camera and justifies that it's not wrong to take law into one's own hands and weed out the scum breeding in this society and it's bound to become a reality if people are pushed to the edge. That's a highlight which reminds me of a similar scene from the classic "Rathakanner" in which M.R.Radha looks directly into the camera and justifies that it's not wrong for a married woman to remarry if the husband turns out to be a pain in the err... neck. Though dialogues are different, both scenes reflect the times and challenges of the society in which they are actually set.

Mainly on the flip side, the climax song at the end of the movie was totally unnecessary. It was so absurd that even the very beautiful and sensuous Neetu chandra bending and gyrating to the song actually made me cringe and at one point I thought of going out and have a fag to let out some steam.

Psychiatrists say that today's abominations of gender mistreatment are as a result of projecting women just as objects of sexual gratification and not as human beings with mind, intellect and bodies just like men. Though this movie shows the consequences of the tumour present in our society, when it comes to projecting women, in one single stroke or should I say in one single song, the director fails miserably. The song is so ridiculous that the guy even address the woman as paramour and the woman along with other group dancers go on with their pelvic thrusts unmindful of how they are addressed.

EPILOGUE: Nice movie depicting pain, suffering and deprivation albeit a bit violent. But a total waste because of the one song. Good attempt by the director but unfortunately he himself makes a mockery of his film and his characters with that one bullshit song.