Film: Dhobighat(Mumbai Dairies)Year: 2010

Running Time: 95 min

Cast:Amir Khan, Monica Dogra, Prateik, Kriti Malhotra

Director: Kiran Rao

This movie was never meant to be a hit. So the question is, why was it made? I believe for the awards, for addition of another cap in the acclaimed cerebral head of Amir Khan.

It is slow, and during the start the storyline is non-linear, its moves haphazardly and it seems it is done to deliberately confuse the viewers, the very same viewers who appreciated 3 Idiots, a fun, but painfully simple preaching of let heart choose your career. 3 Idiots was great fun but unbelievably simple in story, songs except one or two was mediocre and to see how people loved it , makes me question what do Indian Audiences look for in a film. I am not saying that 3idoits was a bad film , it was not. It pointed at a social issue with hell amount of laughter, and with the increasing engineers in our country no wonder everyone related the college days. But if Sharman Joshi played the lead, I wonder how much the Film would earned at the B.O.

Dhobi Ghat I believe is a well balanced script, at least in terms of the characters, two men two women, one pair ( Arun & Shai ) are rich, they make one set; the other set, (Mannu & Yasmin) are poor. To each of them Mumbai means something, something different. They are all here to share the Mumbai Dream, but each dream is different, For Shai, she sees Mumbai objectively through her camera, till she gets involved, Yasmin the other woman, is here from U.P, trying to carve out her dream,of new life in new city, full of romance and desire , Munna a Bihari, is here just to earn, and with it, to dream big, so big that we all know it is impossible, and Arun, who I see as the most unnecessary character of all, a painter romanticizing Mumbai, via art, the upper class Intellectual who hates the parties he has to attend.

This movie has lot more meaning than 3 idiots, it has mood that grows on to you, it is not happiness or sadness, it is the mood of being in a flux that constantly moves may what come. Each of them feels Mumbai, to Yasmin, it is of loss, to Munna,it is of acceptance that comes after dreams break, to Shai it is of hope and search and to the original mumbaikar Arun of a strange oscillation between attachment, reaction and detachment. All together it is a piece of life, as lived by the city and its people.

Technically, is a docu – drama, contrasting the Dhobi ghat to the High rise, two disparate lives moving in unison. However, the story would fail to impress many, for one, it being slow, for two it does not have a hard story to go by..

I loved it, because capturing mood in a real is way more difficult that making a good looking hero stand with pastel shaded sweaters for romance scenes, and shredded vest and oiled muscles for action sequence, more difficult than placing a hamming Hrithik Roshan in a grand old house and create a mood with colours. I must appreciate dhobi ghat for trying to capture the documentary style movie making, which is a refreshing change from Claustrophobic studio shots and foreign locations.

Another point was the pictures of poor people, which to many came across as selling poverty.Now we are Indians, we are a poor country, and we are also a country where the gap between poor and the rich is creasing daily, we live in a country where inflation has broken out of the roof, and honestly ,in a city, leave the parks and monuments , and click a random photo.. go..on click it, dont focus much, don’t choose a subject just click it, and dare say that you didn’t find a random poor guy in it. We are a nation where poverty is a issue from ages, and this is what we are, yea we have many more things than poverty, yes, do not sell our poor people’s faces to art galleries and gain accolades, but then do not behave that every film that has a picture of a poor man in it,is out to gain from selling it, there is no point covering chawls with high rise. This poverty today is an aspect of India,its economy and her people and ther is no point hiding them, but this statement does not mean its okay to sell it, No, thats not nice or good. In Dhobi ghat, many complained the poverty aspect, which I do not think is a valid criticism. It shows their lives in contrast to the life of the rich ( Rain sequence ), a juxtapose maybe, but not using it, In mumbai, life is that contrasting.

I am not saying its a meaningful cinema, nah, its a okay film, better than the normal hindi film that keeps on coming where either they make you cry with excess emotion or make you laugh with excess slapstick, this one has a sombre mood, but it is a refreshing change, without too much dialogue, added color, sets heightened background score etc. It is a simple movie, and its beauty lies exactly in that simplicity.