Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries)

Dhobi Ghat encapsulates lives of four individuals, four strikingly different individuals, from four different backgrounds and classes, belonging to four different stages of lives, who manage to merge their hues and intertwine incidences of lives by being in a complex relationship with one complex city, Mumbai Bombay. A city of hope and aspiration but also despondency and dejection.

Kiran Rao's ensemble of background and its presentation is dexterous and full of poetic details. Merging of foreground and background and many treatments of b/w cityscapes, moldy buildings, its worn-out people, complex choices, bumpy lives, personal and private moves is intelligent. Yet, somehow when the characters takeover and she begins her storytelling, something goes, may be not awry but perhaps missing the zing or brilliance that could have been. Whole movie experience gives you disparate moments to relish and you linger on to certain details and cleverness behind for a little bit longer. But overall you feel disconnected and detached or always trying too hard to anchor into most characters turmoil except for Yasmin (Kriti Malhotra), an enthusiastic chirpy Muslim girl originally from UP now married to a man in Mumbai. Her trailing enthusiasm towards love, married life and small excitements of life brings her to a drastic finality. And you wonder how quietly a city engulfs a life even if its the end. And Arun (played by Aamir Khan), a recluse and a pensive painter while he gets his mannerisms of a painter quite well. He looks away if the conversation is not of his interest. He gazes at city deeply. He looks at objects for details, touches and feels them with fingers for texture to know more. He is finicky enough to use the same mug for his coffee every-time at home. Yet, when he opens his mouth, you beg God to stop him, whatever it may take to do that and you are willing to pay for it. His speaking mannerisms are abrupt and perhaps make it worse since he delivers his words in English. Awkward. Something horrifically amusing and reminds me of another disastrous effort by Hrithik Roshan in Kites. It was to, omg, stop! effect. But then that movie itself was a disaster in totality. This perhaps can be attributed to years of training them as Bollywood mold of larger than life 'superstars', where characters don't play them, they play the characters.

To conclude, Dhobi Ghat gives you several special moments to cherish, things to smile about despite its multitude cliches on Mumbai rains or romanticizing its underbelly. Its pleasurable to watch Munna (charmingly played by Prateik Babbar), and voyeuristic pleasures provided through Shai. She tells us through her character that no matter how uber cool and detached we pretend to be in public but we all still harbor this private intrusive life even if it means just speaking mild lies or intrude privately but obsessively, delving into gray areas about someone if that someone is of interest. Dhobi Ghat is about savoring these divergent vignettes, merging of characters and their habitats but regretfully its not that comes out as one cohesive experience.