Well what do you expect when you go for a Mani Ratnam movie .....a special touch of class , a story line that overcomes the linguistic border , .....well thats what we got with Roja ( a south indian movie with a story all indian could relate to..) Bombay(again the story from a master-story teller)....so the expectations were high in fact very high...
After a long time I found a jam packed Theater on the first day of a movie show a huge starcast having the brightest and the ’’best’’ (I have my doubt s on that) of the tinsel town...with a director who is equally popular and music by the master.. but as the movie went on the reaction of the crowd was one of confusion being a person from Calcutta I could identify the character of Michael Mukherjee but my friend from Aligarh seated beside me says ’’a person like this cannot exist’’ well as the movie went on and on I couldnt help the feeling that it wouldn’t have made much of a difference had the movie been made in Bengali ...because thats how was the story line in the visuals it was a tribute to calcutta....and even at the end I came out of the theater with the feeling that yes it is Mani Ratnam’s gift to people from calcutta ...
Nothing more than that...yes as promised the movie symbolises the spirit of the youth and perhaps well synchronised with the current indian political scenario but overall a very disappointing performance from Mani Ratnam.
A movie to be seen but not to be remembered...all in all doesn’t belong to the genre of Roja or Bombay.