Dasvidaniya

Starring Vinay Pathak & Friends
Directed by Shashant Singh
Rating: ***

There's something to be said about this sensitive slice-of-life cinema. And it's this. You really can't keep a good man down.

Returning to the ambit of the dull workingclass protagonist that he almost patented in Bheja Fry Vinay Pathak delivers yet another bravura performance as a man who learns to live only when he learns he has to die.

The premise done to death (pun intended) in films as disparate as Akira Kurosawa's Ikuru and Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anand, gets its power and glory from the simple yet never simplistic narrative that grows on you… piece by piece….just as the lessons of life creep up belatedly on our hero Amar Kaul.

With every dying day he lives a little more of that life he leaves behind. Though the film's leisurely pace doesn't quite capture the urgency of the moment, Dusvidaniya scores high point for its sincerity of performance reflected in every performance.

The narrative has been patterned prettily as a pastiche of ten episodes each dealing with a facet of Amar Kaul's life that he would like to retrieve from the archives of angst and claim as his own before he's gone. The pace often drops to a willowy whisper.

The tone gets predominantly stifled. The narration is constantly hushed, never rushed even as the shuffling, procrastinating hero speeds through things in his pending file that he needs done before he's through with life. The beauty and harmony of life's essential core is obtained in passages of relaxed rumination and casual conversations that show us where we often go wrong in our daily dealings.

This is done without wagging a dispproving finger at the audience.Vinay Pathak gets the sur of the tragic hero's comic escapades just right.



He's partly Charlie Chaplin, and partly Robert Benigni. But finally this is an actor who does his own thing. Make no mistake about that. Helping him in his endeavour are like-minded friends like Rajit Kapur, Neha Dhupia, Ranvir Shorey, Sarita Joshi and Gaurav Gera all pitching in with transparently- sincere performances. There is not one faked moment in Dasvidaniya.

You may feel portions of the film (like the Kailesh Kher number Mumma) are manipulative in their intentions. But that's life. You win some. You lose most of it. Kudos to Pathak for making another winner out of another incorrigible loser's story.

Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi

Have you ever stopped to think if the most ordinary, uninteresting, unobtrusive man you might see on the road or around you might have a love story to tell?Maybe not! How can an ordinary man have a breathtaking, goose flesh igniting, awe inspiring love story of all things to tell?But guess what - love does not differentiate between the ordinary and exceptional, the uninteresting and interesting, the unattractive and attractive. Because love knows no distinction.It can happen to anyone and once it does it engulfs us into it completely and gives us those miraculous experiences that only love can yield.This is what happened to Surinder Sahni (Shah Rukh Khan) - a simple, clean hearted, honest man working for Punjab Power, leading a humdrum life, when he meets his total opposite and finds love in the flamboyant, fun-loving, vivacious - Taani (Anushka Sharma) for whom the whole world is her canvas and she paints her own life with the colours of rainbow all until unforeseen circumstances changes it all and brings them together.What follows is a journey filled with laughter, tears, joy, pain, music, dance and a lot of love. A journey that makes us believe that there is an extraordinary love story in every ordinary jodi.