Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Paa movie review

Paa turned out to be a good movie. And, yes, it bears no resemblance to ‘Curious case of Benjamin Button’ or ‘Jack’. The script-writer and make-up man have done a beautiful job with the script as well as Amitabh Bachchan’s prosthetics.

As everybody who follows movies and sees the trailers would know by now that the movie deals with the progeria disease. Children who suffer from this are not expected to live beyond their teens as their body ages much faster and they reach the biological age of 80s in their teens. Amitabh Bachchan plays the role of a 12 year old child studying in a school with ‘cool’ friends who question their fathers when they are called bastards by them. One of the so-called friends includes a girl who wants to apologize to Auro for having been shocked by his appearance when she had seen him for the first time.

One thing to appreciate in the movie is that the women have been shown to have a back-bone and are not the simpering women of yesterday’s movies. We have Vidya Balan who plays the single parent role. She brings up Auro despite his father refusing to marry her. She does it with the support of her mother called ‘bum’ affectionately by Auro. She is also a gynecologist and doing well enough to send her son to school in a chauffeur-driven car.

One thing that did not go too well is the mother expounding on the joys of having children while the mother is in her 20s and 30s. Maybe, the moralising tone could have been left out of the movie.

The conflict between the politicians and the media also seems to have been over-stretched a bit. The Bollywood solution seems to be that politicians should start acting ‘wily’ like Abhishek and send the ‘chawl’ living people to the rich journalists house so that the media people also know the meaning of what it is like to be houseless.

We have another odd situation where the bastard-progeria affected child lying on his death-bed more or less forces his parents to take the ‘round and round’ pheras (marriage vows) around his bed in hospital. It might have been better to let the parents be on their own and not emotionally blackmail them into marrying one another!

The song udi-udi can be seen at Youtube.

All in all, a good movie and to be enjoyed.

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