Film Review | Barfi!

Sweet symphony

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Anurag Basu’s Barfi! is like the gently flavoured, comforting sweet cake—one bite, and it reminds you of your grandmother’s baking. To some of us, with a low tolerance for sugar, the right flavours and textures, when blended in perfect proportions, often do the trick. NextMAds

So Barfi! goes down as a familiar, beautiful story, although there is plenty that is unpalatable in this universe Basu creates. A girl with mental disability is mocked and abused at home although we never get to actually see it. A mute and deaf boy’s love is cruelly thwarted. A happy marriage is the glorious exception, not the rule. But Basu shows all this in a style that never allows disability and ugliness worthy of remorse. We are never laughing at it, but with it, along with those who are disabled, while embracing them wholeheartedly. To portray disability with fuss-free humour and without overt sympathy is a tall order, and Basu manages the job well.

Barfi! is a film about limitations. Both Barfi and Jhilmil, and even Shruti, who the world may consider normal, are in a mental twilight that never ends. There is no miracle, neat conclusion or cure to the story which irrevocably ties them together. Basu, who has also written the film, accommodates quirkiness in charming ways. Barfi is not that cute, or really lovable, or pathetic. But as the film progresses, you love him for what he is, and not what he could not be, and that is the film-maker’s biggest achievement. He hits the emotional note just about right—with astute and subtle performances by the lead and supporting cast, extremely competent sound design by Shajith Koyeri and music by Pritam, and cinematography by Ravi Varman, who lends the film an inviting, often exaggerated, bucolic glow.

The second half of the film drags over by at least half an hour to a climax that trumps reason and guile, and celebrates difficult, unmitigated emotion. For a film that hinges on so much emotion, Barfi! is refreshingly subtle. The romance is awkward, but the inherent humour in it and the laughs the characters have at the expense of each other, make you warm up to them. The storytelling and cinematography are stripped of any complexity—Barfi! is the perfect example of how Bollywood can get feel-good, simple emotion right.

Kapoor as the lead man proves that he is an actor who thrives on challenges. He takes on this role with intelligence and invention. He adopts a pitch that he adheres to throughout, which makes the character’s transition through a gamut of avatars convincing—a young man with fickle affections, a clown (his Charlie Chaplin-via-Raj Kapoor antics, reminiscent of his role in Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani, depend on physicality), a lover drowned. He is Hindi cinema’s most talented actor, with the shrewdness to choose the right roles. Chopra’s tricks to portray an autistic person show, but it is still an impressive performance; Jhilmil is a child, and Chopra inhabits this childhood completely. D’Cruz is an able, expressive and charismatic actor and her role is possibly the toughest to render in a film so obviously tilted towards the romance that beats conventions. In a beautifully twisted way, although her life is fraught with comparatively banal dilemmas, Shruti is the outsider in the film. Saurabh Shukla does a pot-bellied, small-town police officer with relish, and Rupa Ganguly as Shruti’s mother has a subtle but memorable presence.sixthMAds

In Hindi cinema, any banal story and a big star pass off as feel-good. Barfi! is refreshingly skillful, feel-good cinema.

Barfi! releases in theatres on Friday.