Dhobi Ghat-Aesthetic at it's best. Review on Dhobi Ghat

Creation has certain reasons. We create for money, we create for fame, we create for others and sometime we create listening to the call of our inner soul and satisfy our deepest desire, the desire to satisfy our own intellectual need.

This movie is this kind of creation where the creator did not think about money, fame, the audience, but he created it to satisfy the hunger of his own conscience that was facing a challenge from his soul to excel more intellectually.

Sometime or other we all do things which are just meant for our own soul, not for anyone else.Now I am in a dilemma to identify the creator of this movie, Dhobi Ghat. Is it the director Kiran Rao or the producer Aamir Khan? I wanted the creator to be in singular form and hence decided to accept Amir Khan as the creator, who guided Kiran in all aspect to make the film.

Amir Khan knows how to do business, he knows how to earn fame, he knows who his target audiences are, and still why he made a film that can impress only a very small portion of people? Because it was his inner call which he had to answer.

This is a true example of an artist who is obsessed with the portrait that’s there in his mind but now it’s the time to brush it’s colors.And he is right. Majority of Indian audience will not appreciate his portrait. Most of us go to the cinema to get some light entertainment to get refreshed from the week’s work load.

And when we see an intense movie like Dhobi Ghat, we get depressed more, as its very black and white, very realistic, characters are very much human, story is very close to our regular life, characters are not singing and dancing, the hero is not fighting, it’s damn similar to the life outside the dark room with the silver screen. So why should we have to pay Rs400 if we don’t get anything extra?

The teenage girls sitting on my left were chatting the whole ninety five minutes, they must have been disappointed watching a grey haired middle aged Aamir, even Prateik Babbar, though he was cute, still a dhobi. The guy sitting in front of me was cursing using swear words (off course in English, it was a multiplex). I knew this will be a flop movie, will not make it in the box office.

The reason is very simple, we, the audience are not still ready for this kind of stark reality in our movies which are suppose to deliver dreams in our mind. The movie has a class of it’s own. For a long time, I don’t remember when the last time I saw a movie that closes to reality. The main protagonist in the movie is not a human, but a city we call now Mumbai.

There is no storyline as we expect from our movies, it’s like the day to day life of some very common characters live in Mumbai. Arun (Amir) is an artist who has a world of his own, very lonely and introvert. He expresses his soul with brushes and colors and draws portraits and he is pretty good on it.

He had international projects also. Shai (Monica Dogra), is a investment banker in US who left her job to come back to India with her passion for photography. She chose the topic of poor India, the poor dhobis, daily workers, slams and rat killers.

I don’t know how long the photographers especially from outside will be getting obsessed with this same topic of “Poor India”. She met Arun in a party and they ended up with a one night stand. She falls for him, but Arun, being his character avoids her.

She meets the dhobi Munna (Prateik) and he helps her in her photo shoots. Munna falls in love with her in his own innocent way, but did not let her know. Arun finds a video tape in his new rented house which was from a girl, Yasmin who used to stay in that house with her husband as tenants before Arun and she movied her life in Mumbai for her brother, but it was never delivered.

Her story also runs with the main story in Arun’s TV screen and sometime the director outstandingly overlapped these two stories together. Arun finds his subjects from her story and the way it ends is very touching and I found that unconsciously my eyes were bit wet.Acting wise Amir was outstanding, the last time he played such an intense character was in 1942-The Earth.

Prateik was very promising and he justified the character of Munna perfectly, this lad will go places. Kriti Malhotra was good as Yasmin and her tragic end is a high point for the movie but the unexpectedly exceptional performance was from Monica Dogra.

She was so natural, spontaneous and I can rate her ten on ten, she was that good. The direction was good whose main challenge was to keep the string of events on place as they were not at all dramatic. Kiran successfully kept her presence unnoticed.

Time has come when Indian audience should start getting habituated with this kind of movies. As you can see in last twenty years Indian cinema is undergoing a great evolution and soon the time will come when the movies become more and more realistic.

It’s bound to as we Indian audience are getting matured and educated with time and very soon, may be in another generation, we will not accept those mindless melodramas with dances, songs and daredevil fights anymore.

Thanks Amir for daring to make this movie which may act like a stepping stone of a bridge that can lead us to the next gen of Indian movies.