Barah Aana

This movie could easily call itself the Indian Slumdog Millionaire – not only does it have Indian artistes, the makers are also Indian :) !! Having certain similarities with both Arvind Adiga’s White Tiger and the runaway Danny Boyle success, Barah Aana is a story of three have-nots who are fed up of their wretched existence and decide to take matters into their own hands.

Shukla (Naseeruddin Shah), Yadav (Vijay Raaz) and Aman (Arjun Mathur) share a room in one of Mumbai slums. They are simple, honest people struggling to eke out an existence in the city – Shukla is a driver for a businessman but he has a painful past, Yadav is a watchman in a building and Aman is a waiter in a Barista. But life isn’t so forgiving - Shukla is constantly ridiculed and abused by his mistress, Yadav is being made to do double shifts and treated more like a peon, running errands all day and Aman harbours romantic dreams in his heart about the friendly Italian woman at his café.

Things reach a critical point when Yadav’s son at his village falls ill and he desperately needs money for the treatment – but his pleas fall on deaf ears. Desperation leads to an accidental crime and with it comes a realization that now they have a way to fight back the system for the dignity that they have been denied so far …

The story has very interesting possibilities, and the acting is certainly top notch. Naseeruddin Shah has only 3 lines of dialogue in the entire movie, that too in the climax – he communicates only with his facial expressions and shrugs in the rest of the movie – and that itself is a study in acting !! Vijay Raaz is the most vocal among the three and he is good as usual. Amrit Mathur (the guy was Farhan’s friend in Luck By Chance) does the aspiring young man role very well too. But I thought Tannishtha Chatterjee made the major impact in the small role of the phone-booth owner in the slum.

However, the director fails in one very important aspect - to innovate in the movie. The script is completely linear and the pace doesn’t vary at all. Sometime in the second half, I even started looking at my watch – even though the movie is just 100 min long ! The first 30 min is spent establishing the difficult lives of the three lead actors and the story then moves steadily towards the ‘accident’ – the plot is very guessable and the director doesn’t do anything to dispel the disinterest once you realize you got the plot. The humour scenes are very few – and some more funny scenes might have improved the pacing of the story.

The director, however has one big last laugh in the end – but that is not enough to redeem the movie. The plot was interesting, the acting flawless but Barah Aana is let down by a slightly unimaginative screenplay. Its not a bad movie, but just nothing special ..