Sagar Sarhadi has only directed one movie, and otherwise is known for having worked as Yash Chopra’s screenplay writer. This movie, Bazaar, (1982) supposedly belongs to “New Indian Cinema”, and it feels like it wanted to belong. It isn’t a bad film, but its defects show rather too much. Still, let’s say it has enough interest to be watched. Its quality comes from its story, and the interaction of complex character roles. Najma (Smita Patil) belongs to an impoverished Nawab family from Hyderabad who expects a lot from her in terms of social advancement, and so she cannot answer Salim’s (Naseeruddin Shah) advances on the grounds that the man, a poet, is too poor. One day her mother asks her to accept the offers from men who will sustain the family in exchange. We see her refuse first, but then accept, and live with a guy called Akhtar (Bharat Kapoor), who in fact does care for her, and proposes to her. She decides to flee her country life and go to Bombay with him.

There she meets with Akhtar’s wealthy mentor, Shakir Ali Khan, who seeing his young friend with a stable woman, gets it in his mind to find a wife too, and asks Akhtar to help him. Akhtar asks Najma, who knows back home a matchmaker able to find a girl for him. She is all the more “interested” in procuring the old scoundrel a wife as he has put his condition: Akhtar will only continue to benefit from his largesse is he complies. And Najma’s wedding to Akhtar depends on Akhtar’s revenues… So there we go, on the train back to Hyderabad, and with Salim, because (and this is one of the film’s strengths, this relationship with Salim) even if Najma officially is Akhtar’s girl, she still feels attracted to Salim. There a very unambiguous scene where she dances while he, perhaps half-drunk, is watching her. She looks at him in a serious, erotically loaded way which almost is almost shocking. So she asks him to come along, and the other men joke it off: she has her poet lover at her side.

Meanwhile, another story unfolds in Hyderabad: two young lovers meet and court, Sajid (Farook Sheik) and Shabnam (Suprya Pathak). Sajju is Najma’s brother, and has repeatedly written to her while she was away in Bombay, to ask her to come back. All this is very sweet and romantic. But when the wife-searching party arrives in Hyderabad, drama unfolds. At a singing party, the lion-like Shakil is charmed by Shabnam’s youthful presence, and wants her. Najma arranges the wedding, ignoring the ties that exist between her and her brother. A hefty financial settlement is made. Najma learns too late she has been instrumental in her brother’s downfall. She tries to plead, but it’s too late, the pledges have been made. Salim tries to help too, in a pathetic way of his own, incurring Shakil’s wrath. But this one will finally crush Sajju, and cause Shabnam’s suicide on her wedding day.

The movie’s strength lies in its unusual combination of relationships, with Najma and Salim on the one hand, and Akhtar, Najma and Shakil on the other. This double trio provides and interesting insight into the roles of men and women in middle-class family relationships. Najma’s character is struggling to find meaning within the two jaws of a vice that crushes her: her own family’s dependence on the ageless practice of using female flesh at the best possible price, and the necessity of securing a husband who will give her a form a social recognition without which she is doomed. The compromises she accepts to make to reach her goal, and the agonized moments which she goes through in order to fulfil her needs, all this creates the film’s tension and composes a realistic picture of women’s plight. Her ordeal is made all the more poignant because it is followed by Salim, the poet, whose powerlessness mirrors her. She's manipulated, but so is he, and he drifts alongside her, vaguely hoping for some change in her prospects, offering his pathetic help, and even growing in stature as the others descend to their abominable level. He at least remains pure, as it were. His revolt against the system, the “bazaar” where women are bought and sold, has at least the quality of truth and faithfulness, even if it lacks all decisiveness. He isn’t even the one that gets beaten (that’s reserved for Sajid, the dispossessed Romeo), and so he becomes the sad clown, the wistful jester who, because he’s harmless, is able to address the great and the powerful and tell them their truths. He wins in the end, sort of, but only because death deprives the real winner from his prey.

 
One little remark about the theme of the price of human beings. We share today a general understanding that human life cannot be tied to a price, and the very idea of buying or selling a person of whatever sex, age or condition is morally condemnable. It’s slavery, in fact. Slaves used to have a market value, depending on their physical condition, their sex, their age, etc. And just like animals, they belonged to a master. Now the historical revolution that led to the abolition of slavery is very recent, and one shouldn’t be overly surprised if places on Earth still haven’t ratified what they voted for. But in itself, the idea of slavery has sounded normal to men for thousands of years. There seemed to be nothing wrong in estimating the work value or wife-value of men and women. And such views as St Paul’s in Galatians 3,28 (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”) must have sounded very strange at the time it was worded. The Western world needed 18 centuries of wars and strife before they decided to abolish slavery; it is perhaps normal that places like India will need a little more time yet.

But back to the film. Najma has the delicate role of the young matchmaker, and her balancing act,(picture on the right), by which I mean her compromising with violence and theft has a tragic value. Having been wronged by her relatives, she rebels, and leaves home, but she finds herself the victim of greater interests than those she fled. She left a prison only to fall into another, where her movements are observed and calculated. She is obliged to procure to the lust of men that she had tried to escape from. And what is both sad and beautiful at the same time is that the man she loves (Akhtar) is also trapped. He’s her caretaker, her saviour, but also her master and manipulator. Akhtar cannot escape, any more than she can, from the maze of this bazaar. In order to retain some self-esteem, he has to side with Shakil, and he has to betray his girl. His guilt looks like that of Najma, which looks like her mother’s. Almost everybody is guilty, except Salim, who, elf-like, hovers over them all without being able to stop the disaster. Well, of course, the two young victims aren’t guilty of anything, poor ones, but they’re only there to contrast their innocence with the dark forces that will use them so they can be unmasked.

Najma’s fix is beautifully portrayed thanks to Smita Patil’s acting and striking presence. She lends her sensuousness, her Mona Lisa beauty (that photo above, a strikingly gratuitous shot at the beginning of the film) to the role, and one is carried away by her simple and assured personification. Everything is played inside, in her half-childlike (but also very feminine?) desire to defend her future hopes as a married woman, her self-respect, her dignity, and at the same time one feels she has tasted the forbidden fruit, and can no longer completely decide what is right or wrong. Her destiny has been played, the choices she has made, along with the social determinism that has shaped her: all this creates a vulnerable, touching woman that needs more than she will ever get, and is doomed to be seared by a fire she has both willingly and unwillingly lit. The last picture of the movie, that shows both her face and Salim’s full front, and in which she admits her responsibility, sums it up: the drama which the movie denounces is not outside its victims; they have a played a role in it as well, and nothing can now change that. Has the film’s generous denunciation of Indian abuse of women been of any historical efficiency? Somebody else than me would have to answer, but certainly such situations have existed before and will continue after it, and many more generations of love-breakers and woman-buyers will wreak their havoc before women can be free in provincial India.

Sen has a good review of the movie here. Also you can check Chadrank at Bollywhat, who explains the importance of the ghazals in the movie. And Harmanjit has written a strangely moralizing review here, which is nevertheless worth reading!

Anari (1959), by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, in spite of its numerous defects, represents a compromise between the quality cinema strain started by Raj Kapoor, and its commercial exploitation. The movie is clearly inspired by SD Narang’s Dilli ka thug, which came out a year before, with Kishore Kumar instead of Raj Kapoor, but Nutan is again faced with a lover who blunders into her world, and there is the same poisoned medicine story, with a masked villain pulling the strings dangerously close to her.

The story is rather simple: Aarti (Nutan) is a rich girl who lives with her uncle, the pharmaceutical tycoon Ramnath (Motilal), and who one day decides to escape from the absurd college of good manners, where girls are taught the cultivated ways of walking and laughing. Atop the wall, she sees Raj Kumar, a poor painter (Raj Kapoor) on his way to find a job. He helps her to jump down, and indeed the film will show her, figuratively, stooping down to his level. He’s the insolvent tenant at Mrs D’sa’s house, a Goan Christian lady (Lalita Pawar, who is said to have played in 600 films! Imdb lists 338), who heaps her affection on him to compensate for her lost son. She rough-handles him, but her heart of gold protects him from going astray in the world. Continuously pretending to scold him for not paying his rent, she can thus hide her affection for him, and invent little incidents that enable her to give him the money to tide him out.

Of course, the young pair meet again (coincidence helping them), and there is a lot of fun as Aarti hides her identity and passes as her naukari in the eyes of the unassuming Rajkumar. She explains later she invented all this out of fear her wealthy uncle would refuse her match with the poor painter, and so he does, once the plot is disclosed… But the fun ceases when, as expected, the kind Mrs D’sa dies, (careful long sentence coming up) killed by the poisoned medicine prescribed her in order to cure the flu she contracted from going out in the rain to fetch her “son”, who has wandered away from Aarti’s birthday party, where he’s discovered she had lied about her social standing.  So I suppose we can say she’s somehow killed by that lie too.

Indeed the film’s moral message is perhaps a little too heavily dealt with, and the characters also are too black and white. On the other hand, one knows where one stands, perhaps. Because if right and wrong are too much tampered with, who knows where if might lead? This is where the main theme of the film comes in. Raj Kumar is called “Anari”, simpleton, or naïve. He resents it when people say it, but admits it in front of Aarti (“it sounds so nice when you say it”), and also acknowledges the fact in his song “Sab kuch sikha hamne”, where he declares having learnt the tricks of the world, but refusing to become cunning himself.

This “simplicity” is associated with his poverty, and one understands that the two go together, because Raj Kumar is both deceived socially and financially. In fact, he’s bought both ways. His innocence in terms of knowledge of the ways of the world is doubled by his artlessness as far as money and its power is concerned. Because he knows so little, he’s easily fooled, but also trusted and loved. He’s lured into Ramnath’s trap, who is pleased to secure hard-working citizens instead of flattering lazy bums for his office work; in fact Ramnath defends his riches because of his success-story. He was once poor and has succeeded in business. He now calls poverty a poison, and if he refuses Aarti’s love for Rajkumar, it’s because of this stigma. 

Rajkumar in Anari recalls the Raj from Shree 420; the 1955 movie features a simple-hearted young man foolish enough to fall prey to the lures of money and power. Rajkumar doesn’t fall as low, but like Raj, he’s poor and freshly arrived, and this ignorance will cause him being manipulated by both Aarti and her uncle. Anari doesn’t go as far as Shree in terms of reflexion on the problem of poverty, but because it insists on Rajkumar being “anari”, it’s worth while pondering on the question a while. Naivety and simple-mindedness are presented as Raj’s weakness, but also as his dignity. Protected by his guardian angel, Mrs D’sa, he remains faithful to his status, even if this is sometimes a little unrealistic. In Shree 420, Raj is tempted by the demons of wealth and power, and falls, in a dramatic but also highly meaningful way. Here, not only does Rajkumar resist the sirens of wealth and comfort, but he can abandon his beloved when the latter decides (rather unconvincingly) to relinquish him because her uncle has made her see the difference in social classes between her lover and herself. So innocence, or guilelessness, is put forward as a bulwark against the moral ambiguities of riches (and its link with power and oppression of the poor), but on the other hand, Hrishikesh Mukherjee hasn’t really managed to make his point very delicately.

The result is that Anari comes out as a pleasant entertainer, with lots of humoristic moments, but cannot stand as a real meditation on the question of innocence versus experience. Instead, the hero remains in the magical circle of guilelessness, represented by his pious landlady, but doesn’t come to terms, as Raj does much more convincingly in Shree, with the evils hidden in the recesses of the self and of society. And this is a pity, because there was an opportunity to do so: Nutan’s artistic intelligence, Motilal’s mettle, and Raj Kapoor’s genius were all at the director’s disposal. Not forgetting Lalita Pawar’s great acting! I think what happened is that Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s limited moral perspective prevented him from wanting to tarnish his heroes, and make them explore “real” humanity.

There are ravishing close-ups of Nutan:

 

And others, where she's fooling around!

R.K. Narayan’s short novel The vendor of sweets (1967) is the story of a wise man, called Jagan, who lives in the narayanian town of Malgudi and prospers by selling quality sweetmeats appreciated because they aren’t overpriced or watered down with cheap ingredients. He’s a believer in honest practises, and a living proof that free enterprise when practised within the rules not only brings money and satisfaction to its initiator, but also satisfaction and development in a community. At a certain level of entrepreneurship and provided the adequate circuits of supply and demand are long-lasting enough to enable investment to pay off, people can flourish and their individual interests coincide with those of the group. This economic introduction might seem a little out of place, but in fact R.K.Narayan’s novel touches the themes of individual and collective satisfaction, and Jagan’s shop, which employs five or so people and caters to people’s pleasurable needs if not nourishment, is typically a small viable firm with a social and human mission: that which demonstrates that work values bring about peace and a sense of togetherness, which larger companies, where financial realities are sometimes of more important than people, always risk dehumanisation instead of civilisation.

This social dimension is perhaps best represented through the character of the “cousin”, who acts as Jagan’s confident and counsellor throughout the story. He isn’t family really, but he comes to the shop every afternoon and after having taken his bite of the sweets in the kitchen at the back (something which Jagan doesn’t mind at all, and even if he notices it, lets him do it, out of pure generosity), comes out front and sits next to Jagan to chat and listen to him. From a certain perspective, he is the quintessential parasite, but precisely, because Jagan’s shop is based on honesty and sound practises, where there is no selfishness, there are surpluses, and the cousin, along with the cooks and a few other people, benefit from them. Besides, the cousin has an invaluable service to give, which is well worth his daily pilfering. He listens to Jagan, he understands him and really puts himself at his disposal for anything he might need. This is a disinterested service which certainly comes from his good nature, but also from Jagan’s benevolence: you are open-handed, I’ll be open-eared.

Now the salesman is a widower, who has been left with an only son, Mali. And the problem is that Jagan isn’t an educator; he’s hesitant and weak-willed; he’s an admirer of his son’s intelligence and originality, or what seems so first. So when his son decides he’s had enough of his schooling, he takes it for a form of self-sufficiency; when Mali decides he wants to become a writer (he will say later he cannot imagine himself as a vendor of sweets!), Jagan bows at so much talent, and when Mali steals his money to pay for his trip to the US, where he will learn the writer’s trade (having spent a year doing nothing), the father convinces himself that this is a sign of commendable enterprising spirit. Finally, Mali decides to start a business, based not on the sale of his stories, but of a story-writing machine (of all ideas!) It is only then that Jagan finds it hard to swallow. Mali is Jagan’s opposite, almost. He could easily be read as new India going modern and technological (which cannot be done without a certain amount of moral cynicism), whereas Jagan, a staunch Gandhian, stands for traditional India and its insistence on autonomy and self-reliance. But there is more: Mali openly criticises the culture of his native land; for him, India is wrong, and because it has been wrong so long, it cannot adapt other than by force. Mali doesn’t believe in talking people into change, he doesn’t believe in listening to people’s needs. This story-machine of his is thrust upon the public without even making a survey as to whether or not it can be in demand.

There is a symbolical image here, that of writing a story. Mali first wanted to be a writer; this is what made him want to quit the old educational system. He told his uncomprehending father, at that stage, that what he would be writing was nothing like what his father could imagine. But he wrote nothing. Then, after having gone to learn about writing in America, he comes back with a business idea: to sell story-writing machines in which would-be writers would only have to enter the number of pages, the number of characters, the place and time, the type of atmosphere, etc. and the machines would churn the story for them! For Jagan, who spends his vendor’s time reading the Bhagavad-Gita (1), and who had first applauded his son’s literary pursuits, this is impossible to understand. In fact, Mali is trying to market the most unmarketable thing: inspiration, man’s spirit. He doesn’t choose to sell art, which would be parasitic enough, perhaps, but the source of art. His business would, if it succeeded (but the book doesn’t say he fails), drown people’s imagination with preformatted productions which could be reproduced mechanically given the right ingredients. As opposed to the cousin’s idleness, which is in reality deeply needed, because it provides meaning and communal companionship, his business talents would develop only individual barrenness. Instead of the sensible creativity of true listening and down to earth story-telling, his mechanized stories would replace doorstep chatting and neighbourly exchange by hypnotised and repetitive reading habits. I don’t know if Narayan was aiming at any precise targets, but today his message rings like a warning that was well ahead of its time, especially concerning some Bollywood productions.

Miles away from the parasitic consumer society that is plaguing not only India but the whole developed world, Jagan’s character is a reminder of the possibility of detachment and simplicity, which even he has had to learn: the book shows him first fighting against his son’s encroaching possessiveness. When Mali had first decided that his father (along with his father’s money) would agree, as always, to pay for his selfish plans, he had not counted on a limit: that of Jagan’s self-respect. Putting his father’s name on that advertising leaflet in order to force him into business and make him pay was one step too many, and Jagan’s reaction, perhaps childish in a way, is quite normal. He shuts himself up like a hermit crab, and avoids confrontation. Not very mature, definitely, but what Mali is doing is not mature at all. In fact what Jagan will need, like Rama in the Gita (who, says Narayan, prods the hero on when he is in doubt), in order to understand what to do next, is a divine intervention. Let's see which one!

Having childishly reduced the price of his sweets in the hope this would discourage his son from asking him for money, he incurs the wrath of sweet-selling competitors, who soon flock in to bring him back to economic reason. And with them comes a stranger, a sort of sage who lives in a nearby garden. He’s a sculptor of statues, Godheads, and he asks Jagan to come and visit his garden. The climax of this visit occurs when he asks Jagan for help to lift out of the water a stone out of which a god will later have to be carved. Jagan is afraid that this sculptor might be a stooge acting on behalf of the dispossessed rival merchants, and that he might be drowned by him, suppressed as a disturbing competitor. But nothing happens, and this ordeal creates the shock which Jagan needed. At the end of the book, he leaves his house, and holding on to nothing but Gandhi’s example and his back-door key, which he asks the cousin to give to Mali, because the shop and everything he has will belong to him one day. He has won the final victory not over Mali but over himself and his comfortable and virtuous life that still held him prisoner. His new janma (life-stage) can begin. He joins the sage in his sculpture garden.

One could look upon Narayan’s story as a vindication for the need of India to open up and attain political and economical adulthood. Today in 2009, this is a plea which has been heard, after all. When Mali comes back to the motherland and confronts his cranky old father who is looking back towards the past, whereas the boy, with his young Korean girlfriend (not even his wife) impatiently waits for him to pull India out of its dustiness… One might sympathize. The young lady, called Grace, is charming, she does charm Jagan (who isn’t very hard to charm anyway), and she represents perhaps the essence of a civilisation freed of nationalistic shackles. For Jagan of course, all this modernity is just flouting the principles and the order that he not only believes in, but for which he has fought and gone to prison for (because of his connections with the Satyagraha movement). How can the two understand one another? And in fact Narayan’s answer will be: there will be no understanding, but thanks to old India’s principles of resilient spirit of tolerance and open-mindedness, the old will let the young have their way, and try their walk of life. After all, even the old don’t always understand the young, they are still their sons and fellow human-beings.

I suggest an interesting review by Frederick Glaysher here.

(1) Gandhi wrote of the Bhagavad Gita, in a tone that would certainly apply to Jagan: “The Bhagavad-Gita calls on humanity to dedicate body, mind and soul to pure duty and not to become mental voluptuaries at the mercy of random desires and undisciplined impulses.” (link)

I happened to watch Brick Lane (2007, by Sarah Gavron) recently, a movie based on the acclaimed book by Monica Ali. It’s a well-made, well balanced film about emigration and multiculturalism, to put it positively, or – in a less positive light – about the still ongoing oppression of Bangladeshi women, torn away from their native land and community and, in their teens, sent to marry in England against their will someone they have never seen. It so happens that the film’s heroine, Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee), will find happiness in the deal, but the film-maker clearly denounces the brutal and inhuman practice, which will not only cause the girl pain and confusion, but also mean that her children will be torn apart between two worlds.

In fact, Nazneen’s story is subtly told: when all is said and done, we are not really able to be that clear-cut about the director’s purpose. The young woman’s life in London contrasts sharply with that of her sister, who stayed in Bangladesh, and with whom she was almost like a twin before leaving their village at 17. The sister runs away from home soon after she did, marries against her father’s will, and is repudiated. Then her lover kicks her out of his life. She becomes a prostitute, before finding work in a factory, and then being kicked out by an ogling manager, and will have to fend for herself in ways her emigrated sister would certainly not envy. Yet Nazneen has only one wish: be reunited with her. The film’s full of the letters they write to one another, and this constant tie condemns those who have separated them.

But slowly things change in Nazneen’s life: her daughters grow up, and are British through and through: Bangladesh to them is a parent’s thing, a nagging obsession they have always spoken about: Chanu, the father (Satish Kaushik), 40 something, who hopes to be promoted in all the jobs he finds, but never does get that promotion (he’s a sad reminder that British good society is closed for Asians, whatever their academic titles, and he has no lack of them), and of course Nazneen herself who, jobless at first, scrimps and saves once she starts earning money stitching batches of jeans, in order to put enough aside and one day be able to go back. But with those jeans comes the delivery man, young Karim (Christopher Simpson, photo above), who notices her doe-like eyes, and soon gives her hope of a relationship based on a tenderness she had never dreamt might happen to her. The three children (one boy died young) she had with Chanu have been conceived in the “old” fashion, shall we say.

So Nazneen starts fitting into her little English nook. There is also Razia (Harvey Virdi), the jolly widow from next door, who first got her the sewing job, and then she learns about her sister’s mishaps back home. Obviously, and in spite of the racial tensions in England (abruptly increased by the 9/11 events which happen during the film), Nazneen doesn’t see her two daughters go back to a life which now appears far less easy and attractive than it used to appear. In England the girls will be able to study, find a job, etc. Then her story with Karim teaches her more than one thing. With love comes the realization that she can choose herself what her life is going to be. This was never an option before. For women like her, independence and self-reliance is just inconceivable. Karim’s love has opened her eyes on the world and on herself. For instance, she now sees that her husband, who had never beaten her (she’s thankful for that from the start), is a generous and open-minded man.

At one stage, they both go to a community meeting, where post 9/11 Muslim young men (and women!) gather to voice their oppressed concerns as a result of increased multi-ethnic tensions in the East-end. Karim is one of the speakers there. Chanu, who has noticed something going on between his young wife and the smart-looking “brother” intends to say things, and even if Nazneen doesn’t want him to talk, he does, and he does so with the effect that the activists’ perspective is badly questioned by his testimony that no, they aren’t all brothers just because they share the same faith. Brotherhood needs something more than religion to become reality, and he mentions a slaughter that took place in Bangladesh between Muslims, who normally should have been brothers, according to the community creed.

All this serves as a lesson for Nazneen: Chanu might be fat and ridiculously too old for her, he stands out more and more as a man of experience, tolerance and reflection. In a society where her girls will have to fight for their place as second-generation Bangladeshis, men like Chanu are valuable counterweights to hot-headed and possibly manipulated Islamic mavericks. In a Britain fraught with distrust and fear, he represents a go-between, a good-humoured believer in a spirit of cultural achievement which many young Brits despise or ignore. He’s become the judge of what it means for a culture to cross borders and reach out to universality. Neither the young suburbian whites, nor the entrenched soldiers of Allah can fathom his understanding of a better humanity based on common sense and education. Perhaps he leaves England in the end not only because he has to go back home, but symbolically because England as a country has also failed to embody what its culture used to represent. (Let me finish this evocation of Chanu to pay homage to Satish Kaushik, whom I had already appreciated in a serious role in Calcutta Mail. Here, he convinces utterly.)

Home on the other hand is what Brick Lane has become for Nazneen. She manages to express this to Chanu who at first had intended to drag all his family with him. How? By showing her love for him, and in a moving scene stroking his big flabby cheeks with a tenderness which was never experienced before between them (and which clearly is a fruit of her love with Karim). And because he loves her too, he leaves on his own – the spectator hopes he will come back – but she stays, with her daughters, and there's that scene where they revel in the white magic of the freshly fallen snow outside. His departure is in fact a reunion, for his older daughter, Shahna (Naeema Begum), especially, who had led the fight for staying and who fled from the flat on learning she had to go to that absurd faraway destination, embraces him and asks for his forgiveness and wishes him with them.

Tannishtha Chatterjee cuts a very nice character all along. She’s “the real thing”, as Karim tells her, meaning for him a real Bengladeshi woman, as opposed to more or less westernised girls he can’t love. But the real thing she is also in terms of acting. Silently submitting to her plight, her eyes down and mouth tight, or later these eyes glowing and in rapture, she’s always true and pleasant. Her moments with Karim are never vulgarised, never cheapified. By the way, I’ll not tell you what happens in the end between the two of them, to keep a little suspense. She’s hope and despair, she’s strength and weakness, she’s the past and the future.

I have not read the book, Brick Lane, which tells Nazneen’s story to much greater lengths than the film could. Still, I’m told the movie follows the main lines rather faithfully. Here are two blogs where the movie is reviewed as well, and whom I thank for having given me one or two ideas: filmiholic and rediff.com. You can also check the wiki article.