The Last Lear

The Last Lear is a very intelligently and well-made movie. Shakespearean dialogs and references are used cleverly. Amitabh Bachchan is mesmerizing. Once again, he defeats his toughest competition--himself. He improves noticeably with each and every film. As his character demands, Amitabh gives a performance full of passion and vigor. Each scene is very nicely executed making it a pleasure to watch be it when the three women are dealing with their frustrations in the middle of the night or when Amitabh and Arjun are trying to stop people from urinating in public areas. The emotions are beautifully relayed across the screen. Shefali Shah is also fantastic. I'm not an avid reader by any stretch of imagination, but I enjoyed this one. However, those who are put off by art cinema might not fancy this flick.

The Last Lear is a very special film for cinema lovers.What makes the film so special is the coming together of director Rituparno Ghosh and the legendary Amitabh Bachchan along with Preity Zinta,Arjun Rampal and Shefali Shah. No doubt the film is really good as could be seen during its world premiere at Toronto International film festival,where it received tremendous reception and was highly appreciated.Amitabh Bachchan who plays the role of Harish,a Shakespeare age stage actor is brilliant in the film.This could be said to be his best performance till date.All the stars in the film,be it Preity Zinta,Arjun Rampal or Shefali Shah,are exceptionally good in the film. People should see the film to see Amitabh Bachchan's brilliance.He is simply awesome and with each of his movies shows a completely new face of his acting skills.Rituparno Ghosh has taken all the efforts in portraying the characters in the rightful manner related to a Shakespeare drama that unfolds and does not have a dull moment ever.

It is a move made in english language, very uncommon for the big star Indian directors. Yes, even though making art films till his death, Ghosh was a very much celebrated star by then. You will understand this from the lead of this movie based on Utpal Dutt's semi-autobiographical play 'Ajker Shahjahan'; the Amitabh Bachchan. It also featured a cool ensemble from bollywood - Preity Zinta, Arjun Rajpal, Divya Dutta and Shefali Shah - who were actually playing the non-lead counterparts of Shakespeare's 'King Lear'. Just came to my mind, this movie is even more enjoyable now where the ageing, narcissistic actor is showing tantrum to the new age director whose views are not understood by the old man.

Rituparno Ghosh's The Last Lear is an artistic though slightly simplistic work. I did not really like the film being in English but obviously it wouldn't have been possible in Hindi or Bengali, considering it's about a Shakespearean actor. The story is interesting, and the idea of taking an old, Shakespearean theatre actor (Bachchan) and casting him in a motion picture is intelligent. Not less impressive is that despite the film being entirely about Bachchan, all the other characters are well-written. Every character is portrayed as a struggling person. In his way to become a film actor, we meet several characters through Bachchan's Harry: his co-star, Shabnam (Zinta), a model-turned-actress who does not know how to act and what to do with her film career, and who has problems with her jealous husband; Siddharth (Rampal), an arrogant independent filmmaker; Vandana (Shah), Bachchan's mistress (double-meaning); and his confused nurse, played by Divya Dutta. I think the film was well written, although it does become a bit slow at times. Harry's character is wonderful - an artist who insists to work on his own artistic terms. I liked Bachchan's scenes, I liked the scenes of the three women who have a nice evening on the day of the film's release, I liked the scenes of Bachchan and Zinta together, their conversations about what acting is.

Bachchan is extraordinary - one of his finest and most difficult performances ever. He is intense, generous, impulsive, and his English line delivery is spectacular. The film belongs to him completely, although the rest of the cast do a good job. Preity Zinta is extremely vulnerable as Shabnam. She lets go of her bubbly, vivacious image completely, and is portrayed as a very conflicted woman throughout. Although she gives a fine performance, I don't find it up to the level of her work in her commercial films - I generally prefer her in roles of vibrant and strong women who are full of life. Anyway, I liked the scenes in which she smoke anxiously, I liked the scene in which Bachchan teaches her how to release tensions by screaming, and she breaks down (this scene has appeared several times in different films), and she was particularly impressive in the film's last scene. Shefali Shah turns in a brilliant, exceptional performance, not that I expected any less from her. Arjun Rampal and Divya Dutta are very good as well. I knew from the very beginning that this film would not work for the wide audience, it's a film for people who like artistic films and festival stuff. This is not a particularly entertaining film, but I enjoyed it mainly due to Bachchan's performance.

I've run into comments about this movie that call Amitabh Bachchan a scenery-chewer in this movie. I'd say he's not. That makes it sound as if you're going to get Prithvirraj Kapoor in Mughul-e-Azam -- but Amitabh's character, Harish Mishra/Harry, not AB, is himself something of a scenery-chewer, and in fact in The Last Lear he gives a nuanced performance of maybe the best character I've seen him play in this career phase, and maybe ever.

(Most coincidentally -- the current New Yorker Magazine - Nov. 19, 2007 -- has an article, "The Player Kings," about this kind of bigger-than-life Shakespeare guy,Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier.)

It's wonderful to see major "Bollywood" stars take on straight acting roles in English. And for some time I hoped Preity Zinta, cast as Shabnam, an actress Harry's co-star in the film he is making, would be given something like this to do that used the mature intensity I thought I saw in her.

Importantly and fascinatingly to me, The Last Lear takes the 75-year-old Harish Mishra and us eventually and starkly into some of the themes of King Lear, not that you have to know the play to be affected by his performance as a retired/withdrawn Shakespearean stage actor in Calcutta, persuaded to take his first film role by Siddarth, the hotshot young director played by Arjun Rampal.

I'd say it's only in the last maybe 20 minutes of the movie that you might start having a cascade of recognitions about the Lear themes here. This guy is irritable and cranky -- plenty of scorn for the movies heaped on Arjun -- but also wise, loving, and fully responsive to life. In a great scene on an outdoors shoot in the mountains, you see true delight replace bluster when the old actor, on a film set for the first time, catches on to the filmmaker's way of using shots of unguarded conversation to compose his story.

What makes this powerful old guy verge on boorish in one situation - he declaims Prospero's big speech about his mastery of the spirits to the back of the house in his own smallish living room, to teach Arjun something or other -- makes him a wise counsellor for his co-star Preity in the next, when he uses what he knows about both life and art to push the unhappy and inexperienced young film actress to shout her anger out to the faraway mountain top, and we can feel and see her grief unlock and blood start to flow.

The movie begins explosively on the Diwali when the film is having its opening, with a fight in a fancy flat between Preity, Harry's film co-star, and a man she lives with who is hectoring her offensively about where she's going. She's going to visit Harry instead of attending her premiere, and he now some kind of invalid. Her character is strong and self-possessed, somebody a woman would want for a real friend. She's also somewhat bottled up.

In the course of a long night with fireworks in the background Shabnam, Shefali Shetty as Vandana, Harish's long-time companion, and Divya Dutta as Ivy the night nurse, form a world in Harry's old Calcutta flat, furnished like the home of a London stage actor at mid-century, and the story leading up to the accident on a film-shoot in the mountains unfurls along with their own stories.

The back-story scenes of Siddarth and Harry meeting in Harry's flat, quoting Shakespeare and bonding over watching guys relieve themselves against the wall outside on the closed-circuit TV Harry has installed, are comical and moving.

As the night goes on - it's really a night of metabolization of what has happened -- the night nurse is fired and then offered tea, and she's agitatedly trying to get hold of a boyfriend who, like Shabnam's man, is a persecutory, entitled jerk, full of offensive accusations, and the two older women -- try hard talk her out of submitting to him.

By dawn when Preity crosses the threshhold into Amitabh's room, I think you start to get it about his tragic flaw - I am not spoiling things if I tell you it has to do with his pride - as well as the flaws in someone he's trusted -- that's ended him up in a tragic situation, and thus you're prepared for the brilliant full emotional finish that follows.

One thing I'd hope for from another viewing is a better understanding of what's going on with a shocking decision made by Arjun's character.

I haven't said much about Shefali and Divya, but they are wonderful. Vandana is loving, loyal, angry, exasperated -- if the spirit of Cordelia is in the story, it's distributed between her and Shabnam; Divya is adorable -- she supplies a comic presence -- and touching as a girl who probably can't help going down a tube she's been warned about, off into her own tragedy in the name of love.

I hope the actors found this first English-language movie as rewarding to make as I found it to watch at a film festival, but I also hope this finds theatre release in English-speaking places – if it doesn't, that will be a tragedy.