Review: BEYOND THE CLOUDS

CLICHES KI BAARISH

2 stars

Mini Review:

Majid Majidi comes to India and falls for the 'poverty is

beautiful' trap. After that, he simply rolls from one cliche

to another and another until you just shake your head in

despair. Ishan Khattar who makes his debut shows flashes

of talent and is let down by a 70s style poverty porn. And the

other star of the film is the city itself. But that just isn’t

enough to make you want to spend multiplex money.

Main Review:

Majidi just doesn’t seem to get over his 1997 brother and sister

against the world drama called Children Of Heaven. So you have

a brother and sister in Bombay in Beyond The Clouds. And yes,

they’re poor too. That’s cliche number one: if it is India story

dreamt up by a ‘foreign’ director, then poverty needs to be the

hero.

The brother and sister are estranged, because she was married

to a drunk and he would beat the brother regularly. The brother

is forced to run away because the sister would not take his side

ever against the husband. Don’t groan yet. This is just the

beginning. The brother is a drug delivery chap, delivering drugs

in a box of mithai, winking at the customers. The drug lord doesn’t

pay him. Of course there’s a police chase through the most

picturesque poverty tourism sites: the dhobi ghat, the fishing

village, and running through pigeons at kabootarkhana so they

fly. If you live in Bombay you laugh at the geographical

impossibility (it’s as implausible like showing the chase beginning

in Trafalgar Square in London, through Central Court in

Wimbledon, on to the C train in New York and ending up on a

camel in the middle of the Sahara desert).

The brother meets sister, and immediately we realise that the

sister is overdoing ‘Where have you been?’ Oh goddess of logic,

tell me, if they were estranged for years how do they recognise

each other? But brother dumps drugs on sister and a creepy

man hides him under a pile of clothes. Sister then takes him

home.

That home is like Urban Outfitters version of poor person’s home.

There’s a kitchen, a sitting area and a bedroom and even a

balcony so the brother can look at the moon and say, ‘I miss

mom’. The sister and the brother then look at the moon sharing

a blanket. And the audience goes, ‘Why in the world would you

share a blanket in Bombay? The lowest temperatures that

Bombay experiences is 12 degrees centigrade (with relative

humidity levels that rarely go down under 60%!)! Ugh!

The creepy guy who helps brother hide under the pile of clothes

attempts to rape the sister, the sister hits the man and gets

arrested for attempted murder. Brother takes care of man

(injured but cannot speak) hoping he’ll come to and tell the truth.

Meanwhile sister goes to women’s jail where the mascot of

poverty, Tannishtha Chatterjee, coughs and dies. It’s a prolonged

death and gives the sister a chance to do the melodramatic,

screechy, ‘I don’t want to die here!’, ‘Get me out of here!’ and

‘Help me, my brother! This is hell!’

The jail inmates as well as the police-women are cliched

characters. But it is made worse because the super talented

Vishal Bhardwaj writes the trite dialog everyone speaks.

‘Mother has gone to heaven and is watching you from there’,

‘Mother is living on the moon in a big house’, and so on, until you

want to throw your shoes at these children of heaven.

The brother is dealing with the injured man’s relatives and weather

that is so manipulative (when the lad is eating at his sisters home,

he realises the family is outside hungry. When he ignores them,

of course it begins to rain and his conscience pushes him to bring

them in and offer them shelter. You facepalm and you facepalm at

the cute things the lad does to win the hearts of the little kids while

hating the father. You want to kill yourself when you see the

neighborhood play Holi (usually in March, and not during the rainy

season) as the lad makes peace with that family, and don’t care

if you don’t understand the old granny who speaks so much Tamil

there should have been subtitles. But Majid Majidi is making a

film in a language he doesn’t understand, so what does he care

if the granny speaks Tamil?

Looks like nobody cared when they made this movie. Except the

talented cinematographer who makes Bombay look beautiful.

And the young lad Ishaan Khattar who makes his debut tries

super hard to look poor, and has flashes of talent in scenes.

Especially his surprise when he discovers a yellow hand print

from the little girl who spills a red colored drink.

(this review appears on nowrunning dot com)