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Zee 5 Big New Year’s Eve Bungle
Zee5 has released two films today Wah Zindagi and Turtle which seem to be one work halved into two. Turtle tells the same story of the same drought-stricken village that Wah Zindagi carries in . The cast for both the films is the same except that the talented Naveen Kasturia(who most assuredly deserves a better deal than this) is only part of Wah Zindagi.
Looking at this half of this preposterous ‘slice’ of life, Wah Zindagi opens in a parched village in Rajasthan which has known no rain for years.A little boy is considered manhoos(inauspicious) and driven out of the village , but only after undergoing a child marriage. The bride and groom grow up to be Naveen Kasturia and Plabita Borthakur, talented actors who go through the film like headless chickens in search of a pot to simmer in.
I felt sorry for both actors who are given dialogues that sound like they were slogans stolen from the back of autorickshaws.
Dinesh S Yadav is credited with the direction of both films. He must have worked against all odds to create something so deplorably bereft of an innerlife . There is no centre to the plot. It moves in unexpected ways, and not in a good way. It’s just not sure where it is going.
Sadly the whole presentation is not only dated, it also lacks coherence , with the hero selling a indigenous anti-China message in a plot that seems way too ambitious for its own good. The talented Vijay Raaz shows up at some point as a town’s spokesperson being bullied by his mother for not being married even though he is 35 . Poor Vijay Raaz cringes through the part.I am not too sure why he agreed to be part of this scrambled film.
More importantly why is Zee5 releasing this 4-year old film now, when all the actors had probably forgotten about it. What a startling wakeup call for the New Year!
Turtle,the companion piece is marginally better than Wah Zindagi. It features Sanjay Mishra as a village patriarch struggling to eke out water for a famine-ridden village: yes, the same village as the one in Wah Zindagi. The drought is contagious: it not only affects village but also the two films(actually one cut into two, for reasons best known to the sagacious OTT platform) .
The aridity of cogent or even coherent ideas runs through both films.Sanjay Mishra could be considered the saving grace of the graceless double-bill. But he has precious little to do in Wah Zindagi and is all over the place in Turtle.He looks uncertain about not only the situation on-hand but civilization in general.
Do yourself a favour . If you can’t find anything better to do for this New Years weekend,then extract your nails, one by one, with a plier. Less painful.