A Paranoia Dealt with Little Conviction
Picture-Prem
Administrators: Aditya Rathi, Gayatri Patil
Solid: Neena Kulkarni, Amita Khopkar, Vikas Hande, Chaitrali Rode,Sameer Dharmadhikar
The most recent Marathi film, Picture-Prem, on Amazon Prime Video, jogged my memory of a 2014 Tamil work referred to as Mundasuppati (Turban Village). Right here the villagers have an enormous phobia about being photographed. The story goes that an historical superstition about faces being captured on digicam will spell doom. The movie had an excellent climax with the village mob chasing our hero, a photographer, as he’s eloping on a two-wheeler along with his girl love. And the contraption stalls, and in a intelligent transfer, he takes out his digicam and factors it on the indignant crowd, which turns round double fast and scoots!
In Picture-Prem, helmed by Aditya Rathi and Gayatri Patel, the protagonist, Sunanda, additionally addressed respectfully as Maee (performed by Neena Kulkarni), can be digicam shy to the extent that she has a horrible worry of being being captured by the lens – paranoia that she has had ever since she was a teen. It’s by no means clear why she feels so, and as she grows older and will get married, it’s revealed that she was not even to be seen in her honeymoon footage. Her boorish husband (Vikas Hande), who retains lording over her and infrequently talks to her, complains in a single scene that it appeared from the honeymoon footage that he had gone all by himself. The administrators, who’re additionally writers, stretch this a bit too far when Sunanda shies away from being photographed even throughout her personal daughter’s marriage.
However this modifications when Sunanda attends the funeral of a lady, and notices her household scampering round looking for an image of her’s for a newspaper obituary. Later, when Sunanda visits the girl’s residence, she sees the image of a younger lady on the wall; clearly the household couldn’t discover a later-day image.
This incident pushes Sunanda to ponder about her personal loss of life and the way her grandchildren can keep in mind her within the absence of a photograph. And the remainder of the film wanders by means of her try, punctuated by reluctance and a deep sense of inexplicable shyness, to get an image of herself. This sudden obsession will not be written with a way of plausible conviction.
And, Picture-Prem appears such a drag even with its comparatively brief runtime of 90 minutes, peppered as it’s with inane conditions. Incidents equivalent to an acquaintance repeatedly accosting Sunanda on the road with questions, and her personal every day conversations together with her house-maid are at finest foolish, and if the writers had fancied that these would produce laughs, they may not have been extensive off the mark.
Nonetheless, there’s something to remove from the core plot, which appears to be covertly lambasting the fashionable world’s obsession with selfies and images. However that is hardly fleshed out. What a pity!
Ranking:2/5
(Gautaman Bhaskaran is a film critic and Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s biographer)
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