Taran Adarsh -
Can you ever imagine watching an Amitabh Bachchan film and not watching Amitabh Bachchan in it? Seems impossible, isn't it? The towering persona and the rich baritone just cannot be overlooked. But R. Balki transforms the legendary actor into Auro, replaces the rich baritone with the voice of an adolescent [who's neither grown up, nor a kid] and taps the hitherto untapped talent of the icon.
Trust me, 10 minutes into the film and you forget you're watching Amitabh Bachchan. For, Auro takes over the moment he is introduced to the viewer.
PAA is a simple film told in the most simplistic manner and that's one of the prime reasons why this film works big time. The emotions would've fallen flat had the writing been sub-standard or the execution of the material been humdrum or the actors been inferior. But, thankfully, PAA scores in all three departments, although it must be said that the entire slum redevelopment episode is a complete put-off.
Yet, all said and done, PAA is an outstanding film. A film for every paa, every maa... for everyone with a heart. Take a bow, Auro!
Auro [Amitabh Bachchan] is an intelligent, witty 13-year-old boy with an extremely rare genetic defect that causes accelerated ageing. He suffers from progeria. Mentally, he is 13, very normal, but physically he looks five times older.
Inspite of his condition, Auro is a happy boy. He lives with his mother Vidya [Vidya Balan], a gynaecologist, but is completely clueless of his father's identity. Till he meets him, Amol [Abhishek Bachchan], who is a full of ideals politician.
Okay, let's not disrespect Balki by calling PAA a rip-off of THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON or JACK. It's not! PAA looks at the varied relationships so minutely. It may've been publicized as a father-son film, but the women - mother and granny - play equally pivotal parts.
The first hour of PAA grips you in patches. The introduction of Auro is brilliant, but the moment the story focuses on the politician and his arch rival's sub-plot, it goes off-track. Sure, there are some interesting sequences, but the impact isn't mesmeric.
But the post-interval portions take the film to dizzy heights and camouflages the defects. The father-son bonding and the penultimate 25 minutes raise the bar. The emotional quotient is tremendous. Get ready to overhear a lot of sniffs and see a lot of moist eyes once the lights are switched on.
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Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Vidya Balan
ReplyDeleteDirector: R Balki
Rating: Three and a half stars
Eeek it’s a freak. A knee-high schoolgirl sees this tallish, bald guy, with teeth missing a la Mad magazine’s Alfred E Neuman. The girl runs in holy horror. Next: the 13-year-old progeria-afflicted boy who looks 80ish, avoids her smiles and offers to apologise. Sweet as well as utterly moving.
One of the iron-strong strengths of R Balki’s Paa is its humaneness brimming over in a plot that cries for the social acceptance of the deformed and the ill. So many marvellous movies have gone that route, most signficantly David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Progeria was dealt with in Jack (1996) but it was far too Hollywood-cute for its own good; even its otherwise excellent eponymous, hero Robin Williams, came off as balsa wood.
Here Balki has a trump card in Amitabh Bachchan who essays the gangly teenager with a mushroom-cloud-shaped, vein-lined skull, but who never ever succumbs to the temptation of self-pity. The one-of-a-kind character is sensitively written and taken to another level by Bachchan, who’s simply outstanding. He returns to the form that you’d associate with Black.
Some of the actor’s in-between performances (particularly Bhootnath and Aladin) you’d like to forget.Vis-a-vis Paa, no other actor could have done justice to a part that not only calls for extreme physical transformation and inventive vocal pyrothechnics, but the skill to convey that the boy, Auro, stems from real life. Earlier a rigorous transformation was attempted by Kamal Haasan as a midget in Appu Raja. Bachchan’s performance even betters that. Despite the prosthetics you watch every tiny twitch of the actor’s grey-rimmed eyes, and a gash of a mouth which turns prim or breaks into rat-a-tat giggles.
Clearly it’s a dare for the actor. Plus whatever the commercial kismat, at its very least, the film’s a departure from the everymatinee formula.
That said, the first-half does take a while to build up and in fact, treads the fantasy path of a young couple cavorting under the Oxford clocktower and through the University’s sylvan courtyards. He (Abhishek Bachchan) dreams of becoming a politician in keeping with the family tradition, and she (Vidya Balan) is studying medicine. Next: she’s pregnant. An abort-or-not-to-abort argument later, she returns to Lucknow determined to give birth to the child. Hello, baby Auro. Gurgle.
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Khalid Mohammad liked a film - that too a Bachchan film? Hallelujah!
ReplyDeleteA Tale of India
ReplyDeleteBy RACHEL SALTZ
Published: December 4, 2009
Amitabh Bachchan has acted in films with his son Abhishek before. But in R. Balakrishnan’s odd and sometimes oddly affecting Hindi movie “Paa,” the son plays father to the father.
Amitabh Bachchan has acted in films with his son Abhishek before. But in R. Balakrishnan’s odd and sometimes oddly affecting Hindi movie “Paa,” the son plays father to the father.
Amitabh is Auro, a 12-year-old with progeria, a rare disease in which the body ages too quickly. (A note at the beginning assures us that the movie “exhibits great sensitivity” about progeria.) He’s also the son of a single mom (Vidya Balan), who never let her boyfriend, Amol (Abhishek), now India’s “youngest, brightest, coolest” M.P., know that she had his child.
An American movie would probably make much of Auro’s disease, its progression and social stigma. Not “Paa.” Mr. Balakrishnan focuses on fathers and sons, and on the great project that is India, itself simultaneously young and ancient.
Of course Amol comes to learn that Auro is his son (Bollywood loves a tale of parentage found), but he also battles corruption (“the biggest disease facing the nation”), helps slum dwellers and finds ways to triumph over the cynical media.
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