Alternate Movies

The merchant ivory site says that it is a film of "unexpected juxtapositions". It is a movie of unexpected juxtapositions, and it starts right from the name, Shakespeare wallah. Shakespeare an english literary giant and wallah a casual hindi word used to associate a person with something, usually with sellers. Like Panwallah, teawallah etc to denoted what that person who is dealing with tea or pan.Here it is Shakespeare wallah, the people who are associated with Shakespeare plays or you can think them as people who are trying to sell Shakespeare to a crowd which is not interested in buying it anymore.

Shakespeare wallah is the story of an english drama troupe, which travels around india staging Shakespearean plays at various places. The story takes place in post independent india, where the taste of the people have changed.The new medium of cinema and that to in the regional language has taken over the charm for Shakespearean plays.

The drama troupe lead by Mr. Tony Buckingham(Geoffrey Kendal), also has his wife Mrs. Carla Buckingham(Laura Liddell) and daughter Lizzie Buckingham(Felicity Kendal).Tony is finding it hard to deal with the fastly changing india which is cutting of its British links, but he loves the country and its audience so much that he does not want to go back to england. His daughter lizzie is in love with a rich indian playboy Sanju (Shashi kapoor), who already has a relationship with an indian actress Manjula (Madhur Jaffrey).The buckinghams are worried about the future of their daughter in free india.what happens to lizzie is the rest of the movie.

This is a very sublime and interesting movie.The movie's has this clever screenplay which brings the "unexpected juxtapositions" at so many places.For lizzie the indian cinema which is affecting her and her family professionally affects her personally also, through the indian actress manjula who is in love with her boy friend.The view of Shakespearean plays as obsolete and things of the past by the schools and other institution in india, in a sense also means the presence of that anglo indian family as also a thing of past, obsolete and unimportant. They are no longer needed in free india.

This again is shown in the meeting of the Buckingham's with a maharaja(utpal dutt), who is coming to terms with the free india, where the importance of the kings have been reduced and they have been made insignificant. A forgotten maharaja watches the Shakespearean play done by a forgotten anglo indian family.

There is a meeting scene before the play,and the whole scene is greatly done.The king and the players have dinner together and the king talks about how insignificant his position has become.He talks about how shakespeare has written about the kings, the quotes from Henry IV.
"Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown".
he goes on to talk about the glory days of his father and how half of his palace is turned into office and his plans of making part of the remaining into a hotel.

For which Tony & carla Buckingham quote from Richard II

Let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed; some slain in war;
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;

and tells that Mr.buckingham should adjust with the not so big stage provided by him. Mr.buckingham replies that he is used to making adjustment with the stage provided to him. The king says

"sooner or later we must all have to come to terms with reality. We are all forced to makes cuts in the text written for us by destiny".

Two people who's destiny has been changed in post independent india.

utapl dutt

After the play when the buckingham's are on the road their car breaks down and they meet a guy who shows tricks with monkey’s. They talk with him and he says, he is not doing to well and that the people don’t care for his art any more. They are able to relate to him.

There are lot of scenes where the shakspearean plays are cleverly used with the circumstances of the movie. Credit to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and the merchant ivory team as whole.

Geoffrey and Lizzie

The movie is supposedly an inspiration from the experiences of the kendal family who had their own drama troupe named Shakespeareana and did exactly what the buckingham's did. Travel around india and stage shakespearean plays.The troupe included their two daughters jeniffer and felicity also.

Shakespeareana 1954

The movie was well acted by kendals, especially geoffrey kendal. He is awesome as the stage actor or the worried troupe lead, he is simply superb. Felicity has also did her part well.

Felicity and shashi

Cast and credits:
Shashi Kapoor .... Sanju
Felicity Kendal .... Lizzie Buckingham
Geoffrey Kendal .... Mr. Tony Buckingham
Laura Liddell .... Mrs. Carla Buckingham
Madhur Jaffrey .... Manjula
Utpal Dutt .... Maharaja
Praveen Paul .... Didi
Prayag Raj .... Sharmaji (as Prayag Raaj)
Pinchoo Kapoor .... Guptaji
Jim D. Tytler .... Bobby (as Jim Tytler)
Hamid Sayani .... Headmaster's Brother
Marcus Murch .... Dandy in 'The Critic'
Pratap Sharma .... Aslam

Music is by sathyajit ray.You can feel his presence on the backgrounds for the various plays.

The movie shows an young shashi kapoor and jeniffer kendal.




Cinematography is by by Subrata Mitra, the satyajit ray regular.



Awards:
Madhur Jaffrey won the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival for her performance, and one of the greatest names of Indian cinema, director Satyajit Ray, provides the film's musical score.


Trivia:
#)Madhur Jaffrey is the wife of saeed jaffrey and the co-director of Ismail merchants Cotton Mary.

#)Shakespeare wallah by the merchant ivory team, was there first international hit.

#)This movie launched the carrier of felicity kendal in UK.

Links:
http://www.merchantivory.com/

Ivory,jhabvala,Merchant

The Merchant ivory team is one of the very few teams that has lasted for such a long time in the film industry.The merchant ivory team abroad is know for their periodic literary adaptations and indian theme movies.The team consists of Ismail Merchant the producer, James ivory the director and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala the writer.

The Merchant ivory production was first started with the idea of making english language films in india for international release.Later they branched off to literary movies and made their name their also.


Ismail merchant died may 25th 2005 and the recently released white countess is the last of their partnership.

There movies here at alternate movies
shakespeare wallah
Bombay talkies
Householder


Links:
Know more about the three here at the merchant ivory site
Ismail Merchant
James ivory
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Merchant ivory home page
Criterion has a special dvd collection on them.check it out here
Ismail merchant death news.
Merchant ivory on wiki

This is one of those intelligent and abstract movie which rarely gets made in indian filmdom.Inspired by the Celebrated Sahitya Akademi awardee, poet and novelist Joy Goswami's novel of the same name. This movie brings to screen the beauty of creating something. It takes us deeper into the characters, into their consciousness and to the root of an creative idea. Unfortunately this movie didn't get its due recognition. Probably, the fact that this is a little abstract and a difficult movie to follow, worked against it.

joy goswami's book

----------story------------
The story is narrated by ‘Saanjbathi’ (twilight lamp), alias ‘Tukun’.Tukun is heavily influenced by her father's creative world of poetry and paintings. Tukun who also lives in this dreamy world, is not able to come to terms with the real world. Her dream world is repeatedly broken by reality which makes her disillusioned and loose her creative visions.what happens to her did she come to terms with her dreams and real life is the rest of the movie..
------------------------------

This is a very difficult story to tell. It is hard to portrait someone's consciousness on the screen. But anjan das has brought out the story beautifully on the screen.

The characters inner thoughts, dreams, visions and real life incidents mingle in the story. The story is narrated as events happening and what is tukun thinking about it, what is going on in her mind.It switches between reality and visons frequently.By making us aware of the real life incidents and how it affects tukun's vision and the way she thinks, Anjan Das gets us very close to the character. you are literally looking into the mind of the character.

The tukun character is a interesting one. She is that dreamy girl growing up under the love and care of her parents. She is shielded from the harsh real world and nurtured in a dream world by her parents. when she goes away from her parent to study at a different place, she goes through the growing into an adult routine.Dreams are broken, you are forced to face the realities of life and made to come to terms with yourself.Tukun also goes through that routine.She concludes that dreams and realities are different things and she cannot expect life to be like a dream.

Even though the movie is kind of slow. There is harldy any unnecessary scene.With in a few minutes into the movie,Anjan das easily establishes the deep relationship between the daughter and father. He weaves the story effortlessly from then on.With minimal characters and a good screenplay, anjan doesn't allow us to be distracted and keeps us focused on the characters.

Tukun who is trying hard to create something, trying hard to dream, realizes in the end that there is dream in reality itself.She also tastes the joy of creating something, she becomes a writer.

***********spoiler**********
Tukun who wants to create something, listens to his father about how he gets the idea to paint.He tells her that he gets the visions, he first gets the silhouette and then the whole image appears to him.

Tukun also wants to emulate her father tries to create the same way.she gets those visions, she sees this poor and sad women in her dreams who compels her to write a story about her.But she is just a silhouette and tukun is not able to write anything about her.She tries hard and still she is not able to write it.incidents in her life makes her decide that dreams don't exist in reality.But at the end of the movie there is a scene where she finds that one of the characters in the movie has a broken chappel similar to the poor women who came in her visions.When we see that character as the poor women , the silhouette that was presented in the vision becomes a full fledged figure.Tukun realizes that dreams don't come to you. you create them with your realities.

*********************************

Cast and Credits:
Indrani Haldar .... Tukun
Soumitra Chatterjee .... Saikat
Ratna Sarkar Mandel .... Boyfriend

Indrani Haldar & Soumitra Chatterjee

The acting by Indrani haldar and soumitra chatterjee is very good in the movie.The movie get's its credibility only because of the awesome acting by these two. Especially soumitra chatterjee, who as painter saikat has given an excellent performance.

Cinematography: Adinath Das

The movie is produced by one of the guy the indian blogosphere hates the most,IIMP boss, arindham chaudhari.But he should be appreciated for producing this movie.This script was supposedly rejected by many producers .This movie is as remote as you can go from a commercial material, don’t have an idea what made arindham produce this movie. But he did produce it under a new production company called "planman life" and successfully canvassed Columbia tri star to market it. Saanjhbathir Roopkathara has the distinction of being the first ever regional film in India to be released by a Hollywood studio.The movies supposedly did well at the box office and was very well received in the international film festivals.


Arindham chaudhari

Awards:
Its sad that this movie didn't get any national awards. Every one was hoping that this movie would clinch the indian oscar entry for that year, but it didn't. Blockbuster Devdas was sent instead .At the national level Mr and Mrs iyer took many of the big awards.

It was screened at the London film festival as one of the seven outstanding movies of the year.

joy goswami


DVD:
The DVD/VCD is released by Shradha Home Videos.More

Trivia:
Supposedly a Second part of this movie is coming in next year(2006).more

When tukun asks questions to her dad about how he gets his visions to create something. He reads her the pablo neruda poem "Poetry"

Poetry
And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.more

Links:
Saanjhbathir Roopkathara official website
Joy Goswami in wiki

Anjan Das is documentary and corporate filmmaker who has made a number of films for leading Indian and multinational companies. His first experimental feature film, Sainik was made in 1976. Thereafter he made only documentary films for twenty-five years. His second feature, Strokes and Silhouettes was highly acclaimed by critics and lovers of cinema and was shown at many festivals worldwide.via chaosmag.net

Saanjhbathir Roopkathara
Iti srikanta

Another ismail merchant movie which has that easy feel and subtle emotions. This movie is a trip down the memory lane, so much of time has passed since this movie was released. you can see a young shashi kappor, jeniffer kendall, aparna sen,utpal dutt,jalal agha and a young usha uthup, who was usha iyer then.

The movie tells the story of Lucia Lane, an English writer who's last best seller was about hollywood. She comes to check out bollywood for inspiration for her next book. An self absorbed women she meets hari the script writter and vikram(shashi Kapoor) an upcoming film star. Through her the story makes fun of the film and spiritual industry of those years.



The movie gives a glimpse of the hindi film industry of the 70's to the western audiences. Like the shooting scenes of a song which is staged on a big type writer set ,with the group dancers dancing on the keys. The movie also shows us the spiritual part of india that fascinated the hippie era. It takes a dig at the swamiji's and the mad crowd that follows them.Pichoo kapoor comes as the funny guruji.




Watch it if you want to watch the younger version of some famous stars. Otherwise there is not much in the movie.



Cast and credits:
Shashi Kapoor .... Vikram
Jennifer Kendal .... Lucia Lane
Zia Mohyeddin .... Hari
Aparna Sen .... Mala
Utpal Dutt .... Bose
Nadira .... Anjana Devi
Pinchoo Kapoor .... Swamiji
Helen .... Heroine in Gold
Usha Iyer .... Cabaret Singer
Sulochana .... Gopal Ma
Jalal Agha .... Young Man with anjana devi



Ismail merchant comes at the start for a few minutes.

Music:
Music is by shankhar jaikishen.There are 4 songs in the movie.
1)Good Times & Bad Times
Singer : Usha Iyer
Lyrics : Usha Uthup
2)Hari Om Tat Sat
Singer : Usha Iyer
Lyrics : Usha Uthup
3)Tum Mere Pyar Ki Duniya Mein
Singer : Mohd Rafi
4)Typewriter Tip Tip
Singer : Asha Bhosle, Kishore Kumar



There are 2 songs by usha iyer(uthup).Both of them in english.It was interesting to listen to Good times and bad times, a carpenters type song of the 70's set to a tabala background. Hari om tat sat is a typical jazzy number of the hippie era. And the two big guys have sung one song each, as usual they rock.

Listen to the song here

Its yet another love triangle story of Saratchandra Chatterjee, that has been made into a movie.This time it is the story of a man torn between two women .

----story----------
Strikanta(Adil) the hero is the narrator of the story. He is a care free guy, who comes across is old child hood friend Rajalakshmi(Reema Sen) who has become a prostitute. Rajalakshmi takes care of Srikanta and he start having a relationship with her. srikanta cannot stay in a place or relationship for a long time.So he goes away from rajalakshmi now and then only to return back to her.Once, when he moves out of rajalakshmi's house he goes to his native place and meets his old friend(Gahar).IN the village he comes across a vaishnavite Kamallata(Soha Ali Khan) and falls in love with her.From then on he oscillates between these two women.Even though he appreciates the care that raja lakshmi shows for him, he does not like her possessiveness. who he chooses is the climax.
---------



The story is based on sarat chandra's 1917 novel srikanta.sarat beautifully places two women, who are totally opposite to each other and creates his usual love triangle.The two womens rajalakshmi and kamalatha can't be more different.For rajalakshmi is a prostitute living in her own bungalow and kamallatha is a vaishnavite who is residing in a ashram. Rajalakhmi is earthly, passionate and possessive.where as kamalatha is spiritual,calm and un possessive.

These two women are metaphors for many thing.Kamallata representing the mental part of love and Rajlaxshmi the physical. Rajlaxhmi the rich courtesan represents material wealth whereas the kamallata the vaishnavite represents the spiritual one.Raj laxmi wants to posses srikantha, she wants to make him his only, whereas kamallata believes she already has him inside her(mentally/spiritually) and nobody can take him away form her.

soha ali khan

The character srikanta is again an awesome one.He is a nomadic guy who believes that every new experiences enriches him.So he keeps moving from one place to another in search of new experiences. He does not want to be bound by anything and cannot stay in a place or a relation for a long time.He is a man who sits in the cremation ground and ponders about life. He represents the part of everyman which is in search of the true meaning of life.The part that is on a constant search to know what is the right way to live.This character is made to choose between two women. Who both believe that he is their saviour.Raj lakshmi hoping that he would marry her and save her from the immoral life that she is leading and kamal lata believes that he is the one, sent by the gods to save her from the earthly life and lead her to immortality.

The story which i guess is more true to the book,has a few unnecessary scenes.The movie could have been made little crisper.But it does get back to the beautiful climax, showing the stamp of sharath chandra.

Ail & Pijush Ganguly

The novel is set in 1917 and it talks little bit on the social setting of that time period. Through srikanta's friend gahar, it stresses hindu muslim unity.

Reema & soha ali khan

Cast and credits:
Soha Ali Khan .... Kamallata
Reema Sen .... Rajlakshmi
Adil .... Srikanta
Nirmal Kumar
Pijush Ganguly .... Gahar

Soha Ali Khan is the youngest daughter of nawab of pataudi and sharmila tagore.
Adil is a national drama school student.



Music:
Music is by tabla exponent Bikram Ghosh.The movie has a good BGM and an awesome bajan in hindi.

The movie is well cinemetographed by Sirsha Roy and directed by Anjan das.

Anjan Das

Awards:
The Award for the Best Audiography of 2004 is given to Anup Mukherjee for the Bengali Film ITI SRIKANTA for finest recordings of the sound in a superb way that lends an extra dimension to the film.

DVD:
DVD with english subtitles is released by eagle.more

Vijay talwar's lorie is a movie about motherhood. We keep reading stories about lost children's and people stealing children’s very often in the newspapers. This movie is a story about those peoples.

----story------
Geeta Malhotra (Shabana Azmi) a rich girl marries Bhupinder (Farooq Shaikh) against her mom (Rohini Hattangadi) and dad(B.L.Chopra).Geeta later finds out that she cannot become a mother, she goes through a depressive period and one fine day she steals a child.The police are after her, the movie goes to a court climax where she pleads that she should be given the ownership of the child. what happens is the climax.
-----------------



The movie heavily relies on the mother sentiment's and manipulates it to the hilt.The case of the lost child's custody can be dismissed without any question from a law point of view.But because of all the indian mother sentimentality, the movie becomes a court room drama at the end. Decent performance by everyone.

Cast and credits:
Shabana Azmi .... Geeta Malhotra
Farooq Shaikh .... Bhupinder Singh
Swaroop Sampat .... Suman
Naseeruddin Shah .... Micky
Rohini Hattangadi .... Sharda Malhotra
B.L.Chopra ..... Mr.Malhotra
Madan Puri .... Mr. Kapoor
Kiran Vairale .... Majli Kapoor
Sulabha Deshpande .... Shanti
Paresh Rawal .... Prosecuting Attorney
Yunus Parvez .... Head of adoption agency
Javed Khan .... Bus Conductor




You get to see faroque sheik in beard. nasrudden does a cameo as faroque's friend.

Music is by khayyam and produced is sagar sarhadi.

Terrorist by Santosh Sivan is another minimalistic & beautiful movie like Akale.The movie is a great accomplishment for Santosh Sivan, given its meager budget.

-------------story----
Loosely based on the incidents of the rajeev gandhi assassination by the LTTE suicide squad, the movie tells the story of malli. Malli is a hard core terrorist who is sent on a mission to assassinate a VIP.On the mission she discovers that she is pregnant.
In the world of malli there is nothing else but death and loss, her father, brother, lover, friends etc and she is made to choose between death or life for another human being?. what will she do?
---------------

The movie is an indian 'El Mariachi'.Shot in a sparing budget of 25,000$ and in 17 days, the movie is a study on how to make a movie look rich on a meager budget. I think santosh is far better than 'Robert Rodriguez' as unlike El mariachi this movie is rich and shot in 35mm. Sivan cleverly uses visuals and audio to avoid the expensive scenes without compromising on the story.

Santosh employs lot of point of view and mid range shots and rarely uses long shots on an incident.Long shots are used for scenes of beautiful sceneries etc. This repeated point of view shots and short, medium range shots are used to accustom the audience to closer shots. He then brilliantly extends this into circumvent expensive scenes.





For example malli and her guide lotus go through a forest.you keep seeing many short,mid range shots of malli and 'Lotus'.Then there is a setup scene where lotus points to malli a land mine trip wire and explains her how it will go off.so you know by now, how the land mines go off. on a later scene they come to a place where the terrorist have set up a trip wire for military vehicles passing through a road.you hear noises of a jeep/truck coming closer on the road.The camera moves to the direction of the vehicle.But it does not focus the vehicle , it focuses on the trip wire with the head lights of the jeep appearing, out of focus and blurry.This out of focus light move closer to the trip wire.Shivan does a montage shot here, he cuts to the close up of the lotus. you see his facial expression of shock and the sound of explosion and vehicle crashing, the shock of the incident gets to the viewer through lotus's facial expression. Lotus tells malli that because the jeep got blasted, the bodies would have scattered all over and there would be flesh and blood every where. So he tells her not to travel in that direction.They move on in a opposite direction.The scene ends.



So what is avoided here in terms of expenses??.You dont get to see the big explosion, no fire works, no upturned/burning truck or jeep, no extra's lying around with blood, no make up, no mutilated arms and body parts. Santosh achieves two things here. one, he avoids the gory violence scenes that would run counter to the asthetics of the movie. Secondly no big expense on the scene, but the incident is conveyed to the audience and they are convinced.

Off this whole scene you don’t even get to see a drop of blood. Santosh has to be appreciated for taking a movie on violence, without showing much of violence.The regular movie's show violence for 2hours and 15 minutes and then spend the last 15 minutes explaining why violence is bad.But in this movie, you hardly see any violence, even though it has lot of scope for it.

There are numerous shots like this where the focus is on the characters and the bigger incidents happen in out of focus. Even when the movie goes to the climax where the VIP is to be assassinated.you don't see any long shots of big stage or decorations and a great crowd to welcome him, but you feel that it is happening. On one level for people in india and especially tamil nadu, the resemblance of the story to rajeev gandhi's assassination will fill up the gap of the numerous people who were gathered there. The mind invariable imagines the crowd that was present at the rajeev gandhi assassination. Even if you are not aware of it, you are shown images of the the band playing , like 2,3 guys and the focus is on the band players with the audio of a big crowd around, then the next frame shows a bunch of females standing next to malli, say 6,7 women they occupy the complete frame. That is all the people you need to show that there is a crowd. And add to this the falling flower petals and the background music, you got a crowd. And again point of view shots of malli with the vip and the crowd out of focus and blurry, makes your mind assume the blurry things as crowds.As the vip comes closer he cuts to a short range shot.The vip comes into focus and at that time again the frame is filled with vip and a very few people.The whole crowd scene is done.

Santosh sivan has not only used his camera techniques to overcome the budget constraints, he has used them to enhance the beauty of the movie also. The movie is a visual feast. It is one thing to go to an european country to capture the natural beauty and another thing to capture the beauty of an ordinary indian town. The movie has like 2 locations, some jungles in kerala and madras. A simple madras temple becomes beautiful in sivan's camera. But we should look at the efforts that he has taken to achieve that.How easy is it to capture the beauty of temple in a busy town??.It is definitely going to be hard so what santosh has done is he has shot the scenery shots mostly in early morning, as that is the time where there would be less crowd and it is easier to capture the pictures without any boy or a buffalo getting into the frame. you can also see scenes of airplane flying into the beautiful setting and trains crossing the bridge, which means some painful waiting and impromptu idea to capture the surrounding.



Off the whole 90 minutes of the movie sivan would have shown the close up of ayisha dhakhar atleast 15,20 minutes. He has used the beauty of ayeesha eyes to the hilt. By the end of the movie you will know the facial features of ayeesha by heart.Her expressive eyes and smile add so much to the aesthetics of the movie.He also repeatedly uses water when ever malli is thinking.



It is easy to get distracted into the political environment of the movie, but sivan stays out of all the politics.There is no advice or taking sides in the movie, it clearly avoids the political side.I guess if he would have taken a pro tamilian stand, he could have made profit out of a beautiful masala movie that could whip up the sentiments of the tamilians and the general pity of indian mothers.



Sivan again stays clear of political, emotional scenes and concentrates only on the characters.He looks the story through there point of view, their losses, grievances, how they have changed etc. For example lotus the guide of malli talks like a matured guy and behaves as one for the most part, but when he sees a tree he becomes the boy that he is and starts swinging in that. Similarly malli even though a hard core terrorist, when she sees a new dress and various women posters in the room she becomes and average women posing like those womens in the poster with her dress.



The story beautifully counter points malli's action packed harsh background which is filled with death, blood and violence to the easy going, simple and loving world of the madras house filled with hope and life. From seeing children’s running with AK 47's in her old place she sees smiling kids neatly dressed in their uniform going to school.The old man at the house makes her understand the importance of love and the beauty of life itself.

There is a down side to the low budget also, from the leo toys type machine guns used to the irritating back ground music there are lot of bad things. And the budget constraint means the movie cannot have the luxury of doing a 2 and a half hour movie with slow opening and gradual development of the story or gradual transformation of malli. The movie starts right from the word go and things unfold fastly.It also meant that santosh has to keep the movie simple and not complicate it with too many moral questions and dramatics.So you will be disappointed if you are looking either for an action flick or a deeply disturbing war movie.It is a simple movie which tells the view of a terrorist to its best with the given resources.

A simple and visualy rich movie.

Cast and Credits:
Ayesha Dharker .... Malli
K. Krishna .... Lover
Sonu Sisupal .... Leader
Vishwas .... Lotus
Anuradha .... Sumitra
Bhavani .... Old Lady
Parmeshwaran .... Vasu
Gopal .... Gopal
Saravana .... Traitor
Anna Durai .... Photographer
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Bhanu Prakash .... Perumal
Vishnu Vardhan .... Thyagu

Excpet for ayesha dharkhar and vishnu vardhan everybody else are non professional actors.

Music:
Completely amateur performance by sonu shishupal and rajamani, the music directors of the movie. The background music is loud at many places, there are times you cannot hear the dialogues at all, the BGM totally drowns the dialogues. And there are some experimentative BGM's in the movie which were totally out of place.

Trivia:
John malkovich was so impressed by the movie that he wrote an article about it in the times.He kind of became a post-facto executive producer. The reissued film's titles read "John Malkovich Presents".

Links:
Terrosit movie homepage

santhosh sivan homepage

John Malkovich's article in Newyork times

john malkovich godfathered terrorist

Akale, based on Tennessee Williams play "Glass Menagerie" is the story of an Anglo Indian family in Kerala.

---story----
The family consists of Margaret(Sheela),Neil(Prithviraj) and Rose(Geetu Mohandas).Margaret the mother has been taking care of her children’s since her husband forsake her. Neil the eldest son works as a clerk in a warehouse and aspires to be a writer, rose the daughter is a very timid and sensitive person who does not do any anything. Rose who has a slightly deformed leg suffers from inferiority complex. The movie is about the dreams and aspirations of these characters.
---------

The whole movie stands on the story and its beautiful characters. All the characters in this movie live in there own dream world and are afraid to face reality. The fragile & sensitive rose spends her time with fragile glass toys, Neil lives in the dream world of movies and writing stories. Margaret the mother lives in a dream world where her daughter is not different from any other and that her daughter will soon find a suitable boy.

Rose makes a wish, another magical moment

The movie is mainly about the timid and fragile rose, who harbors an inferiority complex because of her deformed legs. She spends her time speaking to glass toys and taking care of them. In her small world all those creatures are unique and have there own lives.

We all have our broken dreams and unfilled wishes which lie deep down in the abyss of our heart.Time might have healed the scars that came out of those broken dreams but still some where in the remote corners of the heart, that dream still lingers on.what will happen when that dream manifests itself one day and catches you by surprise?. That will be a magical moment, a moment of pure joy and happiness from the bottom of the heart.

There is one such moment in the play.One day when rose was not expecting, her dream world peeps into her real world. she meets her childhood crush(Freddy) and what follows is a magical scene.In that single moment of care, love and attention, rose blooms, she looses her inferiority complex, forgets an entire life's sadness and dances to the music that flows into the room. she is so happy about the meeting that she does not even mind freddy breaking the horn of her glass unicorn. she takes it as a symbol of normalcy returning in her life.

This is a small movie which runs for an hour and a half.The movie is a ditto recreation of the Tennessee William's play.The stereotypical way of an old hero with beard & glass doing a flash back and an elevated western background score all looked old style.Also the movie being so true to its original is little out of place comparing to the indian environment. If you leave all these things and look at the movie comparing it with contemporary indian movies. This is a very sensitive, minimalistic and different movie.

Cast and credits:
Tom George .... Fredy Evans
Geethu Mohandas .... Rose
Prithwiraj .... Neil
Sheela .... Margaret

Tom George who is also the producer of this movie.

Geethu Mohandas

Prithviraj

The cinematography part of the movie is well done, You wont see any thing bright are very pleasing, the whole movie has a color tone which is kind of old and nostalgic. The tone changed to a sepia one when ever rose thinks about her pasts.

Shyamaprasad the director

Music:
The movie has a nice BGM, sometimes little out of synch with the movie, but very pleasing music. There is no song in the movie. But a music video inspired by the movie was later released. And it has some wonderful songs. Especially the title song Akale, an awesome melody.
Listen to the songs here at musicIndiaonline.com

Awards:
The 2004 National award for best supporting Actress went to Sheela, "for the grace with which she depicts the tragedy of a community fading away". It also bagged the Best Feature Film in Malayalam award.

Sheela

At the state level the movie won six awards for best film, best director (Shyama Prasad), best actress (Geetu Mohandas), best supporting actress (Sheela), best cinematographer (S. Kumar) and art direction (Raja Unnithan).

Trivia:
Shyamaprasad is planning to adapt O.V. Vijayan's classic "Khazakinnte Itihasam," into a movie.

Links:
shyam prasad home page
Glass Menagerie play