I always find it relatively not too difficult to pen down thoughts on mediocre to excellent films. But when it comes to those outstanding films, I always find words elude me. Lootera is the first movie I have seen this year that left me speechless and awashed in its amazing delivery. This is a poetic, visually stunning and a damn near-perfect film.
This is a very 'quiet' film. But it is most powerful when it is quiet. In any film, the director rushes out to tell you the story problem within the first ten minutes. The writer/director, Vikramaditya Motwane in only his sophomore film, took his time. The story problem only emerges more or less just before the halfway mark of this 136min film. In so doing he makes the film fall solely on the shoulders of Ranveer Singh and Sonakshi Sinha. Both of their performances are the spine of the film. Ranveer Singh's restrained performance of a man with a deep dark secret acts as a wonderful counterpoint to Sonakshi Sinha's innocent exuberance. Sinha, I have seen before in Dabangg and Rowdy Rathore and in both flicks she is just used as a sex object narrative device to stir the loins of the hero. I never thought she has more in her than her sultry lips and curvy figure, but the range she has shown in Lootera truly surprised me. Both of them gave the performances of their careers.
The cinematography is beautiful - the first half brings out the earthy colours and the second half is all about the colour white. The music soundtrack augments the film so well that I couldn't see the film without it. Not every scene is suffused with music. There were times the scene is so silent you can listen to the sound of falling snow.
There are quite a few inventive scenes that have seared into my mind - like Varun manhandling Pakhi so that he could inject her ('inject' is literal, not a metaphor ). There is one action scene filmed in a town that was just riveting to watch. It uses the location very well and culminates to a scene where the everyone in the cinema gasped in shock and my wife went "oh my god".
This film is not based on a twist because I already knew how it would end. Lootera is inspired from O. Henry's "The Last Leaf". If like me, you have read the 4-page short story, you will know how it ends. But that didn't stop me from being emotionally devastated in the final act. O. Henry would have been very proud of this film.
My wife and I were the last ones who left the cinema at GV Vivocity. She loves it but found the pacing slow in the first half but I didn't. I found it a very brave thing for a director to do - to slow the film down to a painterly crawl and he pulled it off because of the chemistry of the actors. We have seen quite a lot of Hindi films recently and we both agreed that this movie doesn't fit into the usual Bollywood milieu. It's a beautifully shot film of which the story is nothing new but the execution is just a feast for the soul - a love story of heartbreak, betrayal, reconciliation and of the ultimate redemption. This is the best Hindi film released this year that I have seen and it may just turned out to be the best film I have seen this year.
This is a very 'quiet' film. But it is most powerful when it is quiet. In any film, the director rushes out to tell you the story problem within the first ten minutes. The writer/director, Vikramaditya Motwane in only his sophomore film, took his time. The story problem only emerges more or less just before the halfway mark of this 136min film. In so doing he makes the film fall solely on the shoulders of Ranveer Singh and Sonakshi Sinha. Both of their performances are the spine of the film. Ranveer Singh's restrained performance of a man with a deep dark secret acts as a wonderful counterpoint to Sonakshi Sinha's innocent exuberance. Sinha, I have seen before in Dabangg and Rowdy Rathore and in both flicks she is just used as a sex object narrative device to stir the loins of the hero. I never thought she has more in her than her sultry lips and curvy figure, but the range she has shown in Lootera truly surprised me. Both of them gave the performances of their careers.
The cinematography is beautiful - the first half brings out the earthy colours and the second half is all about the colour white. The music soundtrack augments the film so well that I couldn't see the film without it. Not every scene is suffused with music. There were times the scene is so silent you can listen to the sound of falling snow.
There are quite a few inventive scenes that have seared into my mind - like Varun manhandling Pakhi so that he could inject her ('inject' is literal, not a metaphor ). There is one action scene filmed in a town that was just riveting to watch. It uses the location very well and culminates to a scene where the everyone in the cinema gasped in shock and my wife went "oh my god".
This film is not based on a twist because I already knew how it would end. Lootera is inspired from O. Henry's "The Last Leaf". If like me, you have read the 4-page short story, you will know how it ends. But that didn't stop me from being emotionally devastated in the final act. O. Henry would have been very proud of this film.
My wife and I were the last ones who left the cinema at GV Vivocity. She loves it but found the pacing slow in the first half but I didn't. I found it a very brave thing for a director to do - to slow the film down to a painterly crawl and he pulled it off because of the chemistry of the actors. We have seen quite a lot of Hindi films recently and we both agreed that this movie doesn't fit into the usual Bollywood milieu. It's a beautifully shot film of which the story is nothing new but the execution is just a feast for the soul - a love story of heartbreak, betrayal, reconciliation and of the ultimate redemption. This is the best Hindi film released this year that I have seen and it may just turned out to be the best film I have seen this year.