WHITE NOISE Worthy of some attention

WHITE NOISE Worthy of some attention
Tushar K Shukla

After listening to the entire world go gaga over the spate of so-called cross-over landslide Mumbai cinema seems to be witnessing, I finally decided to put to rest my DVD player for some time, and went out to watch some of the latest churnings from the dynamic factory called Bollywood.

The first one that I saw, One Dollar Curry, is insubstantial here, in the context that we are talking about right now. So I would like to comment over the review-starved White Noise, as I feel this is something that should be heard and enjoyed amidst the plethora of noises being created all over. When I walked into the sparsely populated theater, I expected to see another of those Rahul Bose kinds cross-cultural miss-mashes about the insecurities the upwardly mobile metro denizen suffers from when he surfaces reality in an Indian context. But the way the movie begins in-your-face, depriving you of any favors that you may hope to ask from such a movie that you obliged to pay for, in form of drool-worthy smooches or discourses on Indian ethnicity, what you get is the colors of urban immorality-stark and clear. The movie is poetic, in the way Koel Purie portrays Gauri Khanna with effortless ease, and it makes you wonder how she would have made a divide between fact and fiction. The movie is so amazingly real, you feel like you are a part of it, in its insecure moments, in its moments of dejection, desire and apathy. There is some deeper meaning in the dialogs to interpret, and there is some treat that comes your way if you are the one who likes to imagine a lot with things expressed in a paucity of words. Subtle emotions can be harsher than words, and that is one point that is beautifully exploited in the movie. Rahul's Karan Deol gives you paradoxical resemblances of yourself if you have been in and out of a professional relationship like the one portrayed in the movie. His eyes say a lot, and all he does is reconciles to Gauri's sometimes overtly exaggerated, sometimes painfully pleasant violent exhortations on love and life in the times of sweet-nothing love affairs. There is a sense of timing in the movie, which makes it predictable at places, but at the same time, makes you have a secret laugh, when you pat yourself covertly for unweaving that intricate twist in the plot. The dialogs can sometimes make you miss the other lines and emotions played out in the movie, because of their poetic beauty. There are quite a few of them, so it would be foolish to re-state them here. They retain their freshness in the slick screenplay alone. Particularly memorable sequences in the movie would be the rain washed interaction of the lead pair, the unpredictable reactions of Gauri at being hurled with abuses and praises alike, and the zoom-in zoom-out shots of the duo on the beach, and at last, an ending that tries to deviate from the mundane chores of fighting with ones' battles in a philosophical way. The end of the movie has shades of brilliance in the way the shots of Hrishikesh have been taken, depicting pain and laughter in one light...reiterating the soul of the movie, which says, "Every happiness has a life."

"I have the seen the way, Karan. It only leads to compromise...."