Piyush Roy
Couple of weeks back, I had shared my thoughts on Gour Hari Dastaan, a Hindi film with an Oriya protagonist. The film had opened to fairly positive reviews, and I had seen it with an appreciative audience in a Mumbai theatre. The film is yet to release in Orissa. Recently, during my visit to Bhubaneswar, an old friend, (let me introduce him as Sahu babu), invited me to the premiere of another Hindi film with Oriya characters, Kaun Kitney Paani Mein. The film has got a wide release in Orissa, though in Mumbai, it can be accessed in a few, far between cinemas only. Here, it also has to compete with a big commercial thriller like Phantom, (that released in the same week), and negative reviews from most national reviewers. I don’t know how the Oriya press reacted to the film, but being an Oriya, I definitely watched it with an indulgent openness to its faults. After all, never before has it happened that two Hindi films with an Orissa connection have released in such close proximity. Kaun Kitney Paani Mein perhaps is the first such commercial film with mainstream Bollywood actors. Sahu babu’s insistence on my watching it through my packed three-day sojourn in Bhubaneswar was definitely nurtured by a similar notion of pride. Especially, because come October, I am looking to curate the first ever festival of films from Eastern India in the UK.
Sahu babu is an archetype of the ‘traditional’ moviegoer that critics would ideally dismiss as ‘masses’. But I consider him a far bettercatcher of the pulse and the fate of a film, than the distanced from their audience, critics. He is not someone who watches film as a job, habit or passion. Hence, his expectations from a movie experience is conventional, yet discerning. You can’t short change his expectations from a film, more so if it’s one for which he has braved an outing on a stormy night. Neither can you fool him with advertorials and PR stories like the happening of ‘Rangabati’ for the first time on the big Hindi screen.Those add-ons for sure would make him opt for Kaun Kitney… over a Phantom, but the film has to entertain or engage him thereafter. In Sanskrit, there is a beautiful word for such an appreciative consumer of art, called ‘rasik’, which means an actively engaging, ‘demanding, participating and reacting’ receiver of an aesthetic experience.
It also is tad difficult to please such a member of the audience, because his or her benchmark for judging a film is a treasure house of good movie watching memories gathered, savoured and retained over years. Such a viewer, from the so called ‘mass’, is the best, honest and ready indicator on ‘kaun sa film kitney paani mein hai… or kaun sa film box-office par kitna successful hoga?’
Kaun Kitney Paani Mein sadly, wasn’t exactly an ecstatic experience for such an audience. It also disappointed me slightly, because patch work storytelling and underdeveloped characterisation is something I was least expecting from a maker who had conveyed a ‘simple idea, superbly’, in his debut film I Am Kalam. It also looked for most parts, an Oriya film made in Hindi, than a Hindi film set in Orissa. Certain plot cues that were taken for granted, like the unexplained connotations of local terminologies like ‘upari’ and ‘bahiri’, the pride of a village being selected for providing rice for Lord Jagannath’s mahaprasad, the lethargy of the scions of the Singh Deo clan, etc., while immediately understood by an Oriya audience, needed a little more context setting for a national or global audience. And pray, what was ‘Rangabati’ doing as an item song, immediately after a prayer ceremony?Its robust, colourful choreography is definitely far fresher and pleasing than the routine moves of many Hindi film item songs, but why were its beats so loud that its lyric (the only tangible articulation moment in the budding romance between its young leads) was barely audible.The abruptly kindled romance between a prince and a lower caste girl was another track that was handled in a way that seemed like the story teller himself was unconvinced about its possibility.
Director Nila Madhab Panda has brought to us some fairly moving, genuine and relatable vignettes on childhood seen on cinema in recent times. Wish his window to the adult world had been half as exploring.The ‘different’ filmmaker in him did pleasantly surprise with an unconventional climax to his ‘torn between castes’ romantic social, but by then it had become a case of too little, too late!In the end, the biggest takeaway from Kaun Kitney Paani Mein remains another memorable act from the fabulously talented Saurabh Shukla, as an erstwhile maharajah seeking relevance and negotiating self-preservation in a fast changing world, in yet another little film where the versatile actor shines big!
