Photograph (2019)
Do you like the Pretending to be a Couple trope in all its iterations? Do you like Jane Austen? Then may I point you to a Hindi-language movie called Photograph, currently in UK cinemas (the ones that show what used to be called arthouse)?
It takes the premise of a rom-com and a thousand fanfics and plays it straight. Set in modern-day Mumbai, with vivid colours, shot in a realistic manner, street photographer Rafi takes a picture of sad Miloni and then convinces her to pretend to be the fiancée he wrote to his grandmother about. Both are repressed, her by nature, him by circumstance, but faking a relationship, of course, leads to real feelings…
I was reminded of nineteenth-century literature because we’re talking about parsing business involving the contact or lack thereof between hands. It’s a fifteen certificate because of one (unnecessary) strong swearword, and would probably have been a PG otherwise. It’s also more clear-eyed about class issues than the Bollywood movie the lead couple go and see. Miloni is middle-class enough for her family to have a live-in maid, while Rafi is sending most of his earnings back to his family in the village - it’s as if Margaret Hale was starting up a relationship with a mill worker, not a mill owner. This adds real tensions: how naïve is she being? Don’t his ambitions need to change?
Minor quibbles: the subtitling is in white text, which is not the best idea when your lead male character is mostly in a white shirt. The ending concludes matters early, although by this point we have had another trope that makes me melt, which is the gift that shows someone really knows someone else. Basically, I want to own this on DVD, and the only other film I’ve felt like that about this year was The Lego Movie 2.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/393935.html.
It takes the premise of a rom-com and a thousand fanfics and plays it straight. Set in modern-day Mumbai, with vivid colours, shot in a realistic manner, street photographer Rafi takes a picture of sad Miloni and then convinces her to pretend to be the fiancée he wrote to his grandmother about. Both are repressed, her by nature, him by circumstance, but faking a relationship, of course, leads to real feelings…
I was reminded of nineteenth-century literature because we’re talking about parsing business involving the contact or lack thereof between hands. It’s a fifteen certificate because of one (unnecessary) strong swearword, and would probably have been a PG otherwise. It’s also more clear-eyed about class issues than the Bollywood movie the lead couple go and see. Miloni is middle-class enough for her family to have a live-in maid, while Rafi is sending most of his earnings back to his family in the village - it’s as if Margaret Hale was starting up a relationship with a mill worker, not a mill owner. This adds real tensions: how naïve is she being? Don’t his ambitions need to change?
Minor quibbles: the subtitling is in white text, which is not the best idea when your lead male character is mostly in a white shirt. The ending concludes matters early, although by this point we have had another trope that makes me melt, which is the gift that shows someone really knows someone else. Basically, I want to own this on DVD, and the only other film I’ve felt like that about this year was The Lego Movie 2.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/393935.html.