Reva is another name for the Narmada river in India. It is one of the important rivers, stretching more than 1300 kilometers and emptying into the Arabian Sea on the west coast. In India, important rivers, like the Ganges, Godavari, Yamuna etc are revered and worshiped as goddesses since ancient times.
The protagonist, Chetan Dhanani (as Karan), lives in the United States, accustomed to the high life and with no exposure, understanding and tolerance for the time-honored and deep beliefs, blind faith and the ritualistic lives in India. He is compelled to visit an ashram in India, located deep inside the forest on the banks of the Narmada (Reva) river. He is exposed to strong doses of belief, faith and rituals while there. His reason to visit is money and property. Once he is there, he also acquires an unstated love interest for one of the girls running the ashram. He goes through various experiences (mystical and ethereal even) and those turn his derision into skepticism, and finally, into belief, on par with what Indians living on the Narmada hold. His spiritual awakening leads to a serious rethink about his initial money and property agenda.
The original story by Sahitya Akademi award winner, Dhruv Bhatt, is undoubtedly powerful, especially if you are a believer or even a skeptic of matters spiritual. The movie makes no attempt to have a healthy debate between unquestioned faith and the rationalistic view of things in life.
In rendering this excellent story into a movie, there are several put-downs due to its amateurish narration, poorly done and unconvincing scenes and poor acting. The unit took great pains in choosing beautiful, genuine locations for the shoot, but not in narrating this very beautiful story.
Most of the film is outdoors. Here the movie deserves praise. Most of the scenes of the outdoors, the jungle environment, the rural environment, forgotten temples deep inside forests, places of worship in caves and the local populace are beautiful and genuine. Apparently, even the ashram is an existing one, and not a cinema set. The sojourn (parikrama) of the protagonist takes him to various beautiful places along the river bank. These are absolutely beautiful to behold. The huge legwork involved would usually be justified only for a detailed documentary. The movie gets a high rating only for these locales and the original story.
Unfortunately, the film's titles/ credits do not tell us names of the locations where the film was shot. That information, usually given, would have been interesting.
All the actors were average or less than that. They were often abrupt and jerky.
Chetan Dhanani tried his hand at being the protagonist, the film story writer and the lyricist for several of the songs, with nothing exceptional to show for at least two of those three activities.
There are six screens in the beginning of the movie, giving 'Special Thanks' to various people and organizations. And, there is another screen at the end saying 'Thank you' to someone. This was boringly overdone. We do not see so many acknowledgments usually, even though each movie will have plenty of people to thank for. A LONG list of acknowledgments are usually to be seen at the END of interesting documentaries.
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