Shubhashish Bhutiani’s Mukti Bhawan is a brilliantly edited (by Manas Mittal) film which gets straight to the point from the very first scene. An aged man sees a dream of him being called by his mother. He takes it as a sign that his time has come and he needs to go Varanasi to ‘Mukti Bhavan’ where people expecting to die check-in to achieve ‘Moksha’, just how his own father went in his final days.
While the subject is heavy, it is handled with fine amount of dry humor. The dialogues written by Asad Hussain are so great they don’t seem like lines written by someone but day-to-day real life conversations happening in front of us. The Father-Son duo has conflicting lines throughout the movie. If the father is a ‘Yes’ the son is a ‘No’ and vice versa. Which perfectly etched out their opposite personalities.
Both Adil Hussain and Lalit Behl as the Son and Father are very natural in their performances. Adil Hussain, who is a criminally underrated actor, deservedly got a special mention for his performance in this film at Indian National Awards this year. He plays Rajeev Kumar, a marketing/sales professional, who takes all the deadlines at work with a smile on his face but is an authoritarian father and husband at his house, fearing only his father. He gets the nuances right and can be seen being very anxious and impatient about matters concerning his father.
Lalit Behl, the veteran theater actor-director-writer comes back to screen to give another amazing performance after his brilliant portrayal of a wicked father in his son Kanu Behl’s chilling family thriller ‘Titli’. He plays Dayanand Kumar, a 77-year-old retired school teacher who feels his time has come.
Geetanjali Kulkarni as Rajeev’s wife Lata, delivers another fine performance after Chaitanya Tamhane’s outstanding Marathi film ‘Court’ where she was great even in reading lines from a piece of paper.
Palomi Ghosh as Rajeev’s daughter Sunita, gives a very endearing performance as a girl whose arranged marriage is set up by her father without asking for her opinion. She rides an old scooter her grandfather has taught her of, which her father is unaware of and who would like to have a job and earn for herself.
Lalit Behl’s real-life wife, Navnindra Behl, who is also a veteran theater actor-director-writer, is effortless as Vimla, a woman who arrived to Mukti Bhawan with her husband 18 years ago and stayed back when he died soon, leaving her alone. She’s been living there since then still waiting for her time to arrive. She gives an earnest performance and acts as the bridge between the disputing Father and Son.
Anil Rastogi as Mishra Ji is the manager of Mukti Bhawan and brings humor with his strict set of rules and wry nature.
One of the best scenes of the film is the cow donation scene. Right after the ritual gets over, the son, his wife, his daughter and even the priest clears the scene so hurriedly as if they’re clearing a crime scene, leaving the old man alone. This brings out the point that in a fast world everyone does things of religious rituals just for the sake of it, out of favor or fear, nobody does it with their heart.
Over the course of time spent in Mukti Bhawan, Dayanand realizes life is about living your dreams, rather than ignoring them, as you’re left only with regrets of what would’ve been. It’s about living your life to the fullest so that when your time comes, you can depart without regrets. Realizing how his son compromised his life to eke out a living, he regrets disallowing him to write the beautiful poems he used to write when he was a child. And he makes out that his son has eventually become the same controlling father he was to him. Rather than listening to his daughter, he tells him what she should be doing. So he advises his granddaughter that it is of paramount importance that she should follow her heart rather than following the herd. He leaves the house liberating his granddaughter so that she doesn’t suffers the same burden from society like her father. Now, Rajeev becomes more accepting of his daughter and the situations that follow, after the last conversation with his father. He does not object to his daughter riding the scooter. Instead, he helps her in starting the scooter. He fulfills his father’s last wish of observing his funeral not as an event of immense solemnity but as an event of celebration with big music band, just like the way life needs to be celebrated.
It’s very rare in our movies where the lead is seen seeking death. The only other film I can recall on this topic is Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s under-appreciated Guzaarish, where a paralyzed Magician files a petition in court seeking permission to end his life. In my opinion it is Hrithik Roshan’s best performance to date and finds a place in top 3 greatest SLB films and I feel it deserves more love than it got.
Shubhashish Bhutiani makes a very strong debut as a director. Making a movie about death which is not sad or depressing but rather brings out a smile to the face is a hard task and he gets it done masterly. He’s a director to watch out for.
This is a movie so real, you don’t feel like you’re watching a movie, instead it’s as if you’re living with the characters, watching life as it goes on. I had a constant smile on my face while watching it, this happened after a long time watching a Hindi film. It’s that feeling you get as a cinephile when after being subjected to underwhelming films week after week, you get to see a film totally rid of set conventional commercial elements and is true unadulterated film-making. The last I felt like this was while watching Aligarh and Masaan.
The film leaves you with a line to ponder upon:
“Banaras ke kaaran Ganga hai, ya Ganga ke kaaran Banaras? Agar Ganga ki koi baat hai, to Ganga to Kanpur mein bhi hai… Banaras jaane ki kya zarurat hai?”
Rating:
4/5
P.S. Mukti Bhawan is a real place in Varanasi where people check-in to die.
CineMumbles 