Dhobi Ghat - Baby Steps into the 20th century

Hindi cinema, particularly that called Bollywood cinema, is often a pastiche of snippets and vignettes from cinema all over the world. And the influences are usually aged and not modern. Thus Life in a Metro, the film that could almost be Dhobi Ghat if minimalized, took an entire sequence in its interconnecting stories from the Billy Wilder 1960 film The Apartment, but wove in a few other tales around the trysting place to modernize the whole. Others did not care as much – Tees Maar Khan went right to deSica’s 1966 film After the Fox and simply added in a few extreme characters and item songs to season the tale for Indian palates.

Now Kiran Rao has dared to drag Hindi cinema into the 20th century by making Dhobi Ghat. Simply for that attempt to move beyond the set narrative based films we should commend her. However, these are still baby steps and a large distance remains to be traversed. The influence of world cinema is very strong on Dhobi Ghat. The set of interconnecting stories shifting and reforming like dynamic puzzle pieces around a teeming city, and the pensive mood set by the reclusive artist as he broods over video-taped letters he finds, makes it easy to spot the unmistakable Wong Kar Wai influence. In 1994 Kar Wai made Chungking Express, a story of two love-lorn policemen, unconnected tales, except for the city they were in, and the fact that both had lost love. There too the mood was pensive, dreamy, and whole film an artist’s palette of color, mood and motion. Of course more recently Inarritu has taken interconnecting stories to a different level, starting with Amores Perros. The stories intersect usually triggered by some violent or catastrophic event, something that has no doubt influenced Kiran Rao. Skirting city centric films like Paris Je T’Aime, which somehow tried to connect 20 stories set in the real star of the film, Paris, she makes Mumbai an almost living breathing entity without glorifying it in any way. This is a scary Mumbai, where the watchman does not know what happened to a past tenant and (without spoilers given away) that seems almost unbelievable, there are drug wars and killings, and good looking men pimp their looks for money.
The package is let down by some amateurish writing that is riddled with coincidences, and some miscasting that drags down the effort.
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