Much of my review concurs with that of the others.
The movie is a collection of five short stories, each trying to paint a picture. It is mostly up to the viewer how much he is able to piece together to reconstruct what the director wanted to convey.
1. Sujata: A poignant tale, in all flesh and blood literally, from the view point of a woman; the protagonist being brought to life by the sheer marvel of Huma Qureshi. The way she portrays her character with such conviction and realism makes me fall in love with her every time I see her on screen! With Sujata, you are thrown in to the mind and body of an average woman. Well directed and well conceived; although, since it begins on a slightly fast pace, you are initially hurried to grasp the story.
2. Epilogue: The direction went somewhat overboard with the camera angles and close ups. Overall a wonderful narration of the connectedness (or the lack of it) in a relationship. The acting was good, but somewhere we feel that the story could have been given a few more minutes in the build up in order to give the bigger picture the required meaning.
3. Audacity: Again, an excellent portrayal of the parent-child relationship and the stress of the generation gap. The story has a comical touch in the concluding half. One wonders if the protagonist could have been a boy, instead of the teenaged daughter, in order to lend some more relevance to the story.
4. Mehfooz: Nawazuddin Siddique plays the protagonist. The story has concealed romantic connotations associated with it, although the protagonist more or less gives his character the outlook of a lecherous and cheap (read tharki) galoot by the way of his portrayal. Could the story have done better with a different setting: one that did not involve corpses or shabbily dressed beggar (was the scene of the cockroach really required?)
5. Shor: By far the best of the lot (in my opinion). A depiction of how the realisation of an imminent death or a catastrophe throws off the mask of imposture from our faces and connects us with our own inner self and its true emotions.
