HAWAIZAADA Movie Review: Well shot & production designed but boring
This Indian filmmaker, like the
British and the Europeans, seems to
know the art and commerce of
making a low-cost period drama.
HAWAIZAADA is an example of how
you can make a historical film
without spending a fortune. It’s a
well shot and production designed
musical heavily inspired by Broadway
productions just the way Sanjay Leela
Bhansali’s films are. This proves to
be the undoing of the film, making it
obviously stagy and thus boring.
The film is set in the state of
Bombay of 1895 and is based on the
life and time of Shivkar Bapuji
Talpade a.k.a Shivi (Ayushmann
Khurrana). He is a kind of school
dropout, comes from a family of rich
zamindaars , and is a misfit genius.
His father disowns him for his
wayward unconventional ways. He
falls in love with a courtesan and
‘Tamasha’ artiste called Sitara (Pallavi
Sharda) and wants to marry her. She
too likes him but does not consider
herself fit to be his wife and leaves
him after a brief courtship.
A devastated Talpade takes to
drinking but a geeky and nerdy
scientist and inventor Pandit
Subbaraya Shastry (Mithun
Chakraborty) saves him from ruin,
and provides him with a reason to
live. He is developing an airplane,
the first one in the history of the
world, based on some ancient text
and drawings on avionics culled out
from one of the Vedas. The British
regime thinks Shastry is a
revolutionary and is into making
bombs. Shastry-Talpade combo
succeeds in developing a working
prototype with financial help from
the king of Baroda. They also give a
public demo of it. The experiment is
not fully successful. In the meantime
Sitara returns to Bombay. Shivi sells
the valuable treaties of Shastry Ji to
the British officer to have money to
pay off Sitara’s debt. The heart
broken Shastry dies and Shivi can
only redeem himself by making the
dream of his mentor, of inventing
the first manned flight, come true.
The basic ‘operatic’ structure and
mise-en-scène of the film makes it
look more like a fantasy than the
recreation of historical reality. The
filmmakers have used up all their
creative energies in decorating the
frames, filling it with artifacts and
props and stagy, over-dramatic,
caricaturish, and colorful characters.
The screenplay fails to identify and
develop the key scenes from
storytelling perspective.
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