I watched Photograph (a Bollywood movie) all the while thinking to myself why am I watching this. It’s a romantic drama, very well taken, but unbelievable too in that it’s the story of a middle class girl going out with a random photographer dude she met near India Gate. She liked the photo he took, and he lied to his grandma that he is going out with this girl (so she stops pestering him about getting married), so she agrees to be with him in front of the visiting grandma to keep her happy. That doesn’t make sense to me. If I were a girl, I can’t imagine agreeing to go with a street photographer (or any stranger guy for that matter, but even more so a random street person) just for the heck of it. There’s so much stories about rape and all that, I’d be scared shit for my life. Of course, it’s Nawazuddin Siddiqui, so yeah … why not, when watching the movie your mind is like sure it’s possible … but I wonder how I’d feel if it was a totally unknown actor playing that role. That would have been more authentic and made believing the story even more difficult.
Anyways, that out of my chest, Photograph is a wonderful movie. I really enjoyed it. Things I liked: 1) the camera work, the way they captured Mumbai and the environment and the family … just the angles and the crowd … everything. It’s just beautiful, there’s an art to it, you must watch the movie just for that if nothing else; 2) the way the story is taken, it’s very sweet, very subtle and cute one could say …nothing over done here, just two people getting to know each other and slowly falling in love. They don’t even express their love, nor does the movie claim to be anything different to other movies of a similar story … it’s just nice. A fresh take on the same old story, with no pretense that it is anything else.
What I didn’t like is the fact that I always had in my head that this is kind of unbelievable, plus the question of what’s going to inevitably happen with the family knowing etc. Interestingly the movie didn’t go into that at all but just ended on a self-referential note … which was both smart and irritating coz it feels like there’s been no conclusion to the story. I liked the end but also felt dissatisfied.
Special mention to the person who played the grandma. She was amazing. As was all the other characters in the movie actually. The girl Sanya Malhotra, all of Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s friends … Mumbai itself! A good watch.