Anil Sharma who was all for gritted teeth and clenched fists in Gadar, goes incurably lachrymose in his new film Vanvaas. Set in the saffron splendour of Varanasi, Sharma’s cinema is an old-fashioned weepie with a bleeding heart and visuals that exude an over-saturated emotional meltdown in fits and starts.
It is a familiar tale often told since Shakespeare’s King Lear, of ungrateful children, this time abandoning their father to die in Varanasi. But these progenies from hell are substantially more wretched, less interesting in their toxicity, than their counterparts in the past including the Bachchan bunch in Ravi Chopra’s Baghban.
Nana Patekar plays Tyagi, the dementia-riddled patriarch who spends all his time day dreaming about his dead wife (Khushboo, playing a pretty ghost). After being abandoned by his children and their wives in Varanasi (to the sound a clamorous Bhajan), Tyagi who suffers from what seems to be advanced dementia, befriends a mischievous tourist volunteer (Utkarsh Sharma, playing the roguish charmer with gusto).
The Patekar-Sharma sequences, especially their drunken revelry have a dash of the Bachchan-Rishi bacchanalia. The duo are easygoing and fluent together.
The trouble is, too many extraneous characters including a love interest for young Sharma, jump into what is essentially a two-handler about two lost souls.
Competent, ever-reliable actors like Ashwini Kalsekar and Rajpal Yadav add playing time and little else to the elongated narration.
But the final twenty-five minutes of payoff make up for the excessive zeal of the writers. When Patekar’s Tyagi finally finds his way home, he gets into the accusatory mode without getting hysterical and the writer finally find their voices.
This is a rare occurrence in a Patekar film. The reined-in outburst, more sad than angry, made me wonder why Patekar doesn’t practice more control on screen. He is as effective at the lower octaves as the higher notes.
The cast of ungrateful off (their rockers) springs leaves no impression beyond a collective blur of bestial blah. Wouldn’t some shades of grey in the ungrateful canvas have added more interest to the goings on?
Whatever its sins of clunkiness, Vanvaas makes up for its meandering mood whenever Patekar and young Sharma are on screen together. They seem to be having a lot of fun with their parts, even when the writers are more keen on length than breadth. Eventually the 2 hour 40 minute expedition into filial failings leaves us with sense of regret: for all the abandoned parents of the world , and for this film which could have been so much better with a bit of trimming around the edges, abandoning the superfluous characters in this feelingly staged fable of abandonment.
