I love art movies and Nawazuddin Siddiqui is one of my most favorite actors. Whenever I hear that his movie is out - I want to see it.
We saw "Haraamkhor" at the theater but didn't bring our daughter with us. I was told that it will have some sexual content and lots of bad language.
The movie is set somewhere in rural India, the landscape is bleak and dusty. The heroes are a 15 year old student Sandhya (Shweta Tripathi) and a school teacher Shyam (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). Sandhya lives with her father - a policeman and Shyam - with his wife.
Although we were warned by the note on the screen about a serious problem that Indian government schools are having, especially regarding girls, I had no idea about how will this "female problem" will be depicted. I was actually expecting some horrible female abuse (current Indian trend). But there was none of that.
The lead female personage Sandhya came up as rebellious, expressive, strong and "modern" girl. We do not see the "tradition" here, the caste etc...After watching it I felt that "Indian village may not be that bad after all". I found more positives than negatives in it.
There wasn't a lot of bad language either. I didn't even notice it and while there were some naked backs, it wasn't too sexual.
Of course, the acting and the dialogues were amazing, my husband thought though that the scene with the windmills was overdone, but I liked it. I take it as if local people probably would watch the same scenery again and again (as there is not much to look at in a small village).
There seemed to be two parallel stories happening in the movie at the same time. One was the Sandhya's and Shyam's "chakkar" (affair) and the other one was the little boy's Kamal's (Irfan Khan) one- sided crush on Sandhya. Those two stories seemed to intertwine very little with each other somehow, meeting only occasionally.
It was fun to watch the act of Mintu (Mohd Samad) and Kamal (Irfan Khan), because they were kids and acted effortlessly and naturally. I was wondering if they were the real village kids picked up from there and asked to act or were they some young geniuses...I thought one needs a lot of guts to run around in underwear and pull off whatever they were pulling off.
The magnetism between Shyam and Sandhya was weird and amazing. She was just a 15 year old and Shyam was probably 25 - 30 or so...The young actress face created some sort of magic on the screen when together with Shyam.
Sandhya's father, the police inspector (Harish Khanna) was a very interesting character too. He was distant, skinny, a little philosophical. He too was not a stereotypical police officer and it was nice to see it.
I rated this film 9 stars because despite all of the things that I loved: the cast, the location, the photography, the dialogues, the humor (yes, there was some good humor), the "mood", the music, there was something about the story where I hoped for some more completion, more power (?!). Although perhaps it's the type of story where completion is not possible: the whole film seemed like a fragment captured by a camera of someone who passes by...There seems to be no defined beginning and no defined end and it doesn't seem to matter...Maybe that was the director Shlok Sharma's idea?
Other than that I enjoyed the experience, the calmness, the humor and the realism of "Haraamkhor". It felt like peeping through a keyhole into someone's village, someone's life.
