Movie Review: Nishabd - A Desi Oldie's Take

Instant reaction to the movie: It's phony.

I don't think the film has come to my town, Mysore, which has a sizable presence of Nishabd's target audience - senior citizens. I wish the local film society holds special screening for oldies on the next 'Father's Day'. The movie has educative value insofar as it opens out possibilities for eligible oldies, with time on hand and twiddling their thumbs waiting for out-of-the-box adulthood ideas.

For those unfamiliar with the theme, the film is about a sixty-year old falling for a teenage friend his daughter brought home for vacation. Maybe it is the other way round, with the teenager getting serious on someone old enough to be her father. I don't know if our generation next really goes for such men, and themes.

In the book, Lolita, from which film-maker Ram Gopal Verma, presumably, drew inspiration, author Nabokov made the plot a lot more messy, but this doesn't make Nishabd any less disgusting for me, a desi oldie with a middle-class mindset.

Nishabd is a cross-culture movie, in the sense that a plot that belonged to Ramsdale, New England, gets played out in Ranikhet, a hill town in UP (or wherever the film has been shot). One wonders if the theme and substance of this story is truly adaptable in a desi setting. Of all the fantasy Bollywood has made, a movie of this 18-60 love equation depicted in Nishabd is truly outlandish.

My wife (we're in 64-68 age equation) embellished our film-watching pleasure with her expert comments throughout the run of the DVD. When a dejected Amitabh, driven to a suicide attempt, returns home without accomplishing it my wife said it all in Tamil: "Avan Nasamai poga!" (damn him!). For the teenage lover in Nishabd she used a stock word: "kazhusadai (garbage).

I don't see why Amitabh Bachchan has to affect a whisper when he bursts into a monologue. Besides being irritating, I couldn't catch much of what he says. If Amitabh mumbles through the film on director's orders, it could do with sub-titles. Nishabd is nothing if not script-driven. When he doesn't mumble we see a lot of jeep driving by Mr B. For me his most dramatic gesture in the film was when Amitabh gives a lingering blank stare when Jiah Khan, teenage friend of his daughter, tells the old man she has a crush on him.

The 18-year-old asks her friend's father, married for 27 years, if he has had any 'chukkar' with someone after marriage. I don't know if this kind of talk is commonplace even the most westernized desi families.