Guru
Cast: Abhishek Bacchan, Aishwarya Roy, R. Madhavan, Mithun Chakrabarty, Music: A R Rahman, Direction: Mani Ratnam



Namratha Joshi, the film critic from Outlook wrote this about Yuva, Ratnam's last movie, 'Yuva is not a good film, it pretends to be a good film'. Thinking about it there is something distinct I noticed while watching Mani Ratnam's Guru. It makes the audience feel that they are watching a good film, while presenting them a normal Bollywood fare with usual potboiler stuff in a more refined and technically fine format.

That said, Guru is a watchable film. Political diplomacy aside, It is about Dhirubai Ambani told in a fictitious setup with fictitious names. Here the protagonist is actually called 'Gurubai'. The rest of the characters are left for your imagination. As the movie progresses, you suddenly discover someone, point out and yell, 'hey that's Nusli Wadia'. And, 'hey, that's Goenka'. Well, interestingly enough, at some poignantly intelligent moment, the audience even yells 'hey that's Mani Ratnam'.

Guru has excellent cinematography, good songs, powerful, yet unnecessary background score, and sophisticated artwork. This is backed by Abhishek's life-time performance ably backed by deliberately underplayed contributions by Mithunda and Madhavan. Abhishek has notched a few scales higher in his profile as his role is going to be talked about for a very long time. I didn't bother myself much with either the look-and-feel or the performance of Aishwarya.

That said, I have certain problems with Mani Ratnam's approach to film making, which I have stated in my earlier blogs. Guru follows all of them. I noticed another issue here of telling a true story in a fictitious setting. I didn't like the guessing game idea for a movie watching experience. I would have liked if Ratnam had gone to Ambani brothers, secured an official permission and named the film 'Dhirubai'. True that the real-life stories haven't done well in India and often turned controversial. But camaflouaging them in a fictitous setting is not a trait of a brave and good filmmaker either. It certainly doesn't gel with the director who, in his earlier films, with outrageous courage, made his lead character fall in love with a sex worker, and introduced a five-year old, mentally challenged kid as the protagonist.

Curiously too, Guru reminded me of several of Ratnam's earlier movies, predominantly Nayagan and Iruvar. It seemed like the director watched these two movies, felt he hasn't done justice to some scenes and decided to better them in Guru.

Guru will whet the appetite of people who crave for good films but don't have patience for the same.