There is not one insincere note struck in the length and breadth of director Ankit Sakhiya’s elegant, pristine, and guileless Laalo Shree Krishna Sada Sahayate, a film that has the rare distinction and the power to change lives.
Provided you are open to listening carefully to what the film has to say, despite all the drama about a missing person being “rescued” in unexpected ways by Lord Krishna. On paper, this sounds like a tough gambit to pull off.
Director Sakhiya and his extremely impassioned team compel us to believe in their belief. Ironically, the Hindi version of the Gujarati film, which comes to us after creating a historic box-office record in Gujarat (it was budgeted at Rs 50 lakhs and earned Rs 120 crores making it the most successful Gujarati film of all time), arrived during the same week as The RajaSaab which reportedly budgeted at Rs 550 crores, is geared up to become one of the costliest duds of all time.
Laalo Shree Krishna Sada Sahayate’s skimpy budget (even one of the songs of RajaSaab cost more to shoot), which could have been a glaring impediment, actually proves to be a boon in disguise, as the serene screenplay (Krushansh Vaja, Vicky Poornima, and Ankit Sakhiya) demands the protagonist to trespass into a home to be locked away from civilization for most of the time.
In this quaint and endearing fusion of a survival drama and a spiritual awakening, the protagonist Laalo (a fiercely dedicated performance by debutant Karan Joshi), a hand-to-mouth autorickshaw driver with a demanding wife and a mounting debt, barges into an empty home and gets locked in.
Home Alone, anyone?
From here begins what seems to be Rajkumar Rao’s Trapped caught in a spiritual whirligig. It is an enormously tricky coalescence to pull off. The merger of a survival drama with mythology works swimmingly for two reasons: it comes from a place of absolute integrity, and also, the actors keep the faith alive right till the very end.
Not all of it works, though. The smuggling of statues seems a clumsy theatrical touch, ill-suited in a work of seamless splendour, supported and buoyed by some excellent Krishna Bhajans which know exactly where to play and where not to be playful.
The Junagadh locations help tremendously in giving a nod of gravitas to the mood of mischievous mythologization. The conversations between the trapped protagonist and ‘God’ are a weightless blend of banter and philosophy.
The greatness of Laalo Shree Krishna Sada Sahayate is not in its cinematic qualities, but in sublimating ‘cinema’ to serve us with an artless and, dare I say, timeless treatise on greed and God, and everything that comes in-between.
If you watch only one film a year, then Laalo Shree Krishna Sada Sahayate is the one for you. If you watch two films a year, then watch Laalo Shree Krishna Sada Sahayate and Dhurandhar. They are the two sides of the coin conveying the conundrum of existence.
