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Release date:
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April 21, 2017
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Director:
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Sunhil Sippy
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Cast:
Language:
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Sonakshi Sinha,
Kanan Gill, Shibani Dandekar, Purab Kohli, Smita Tambe, M.K. Raina, Suchitra Pillai,
Manish Chaudhari
Hindi
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Noor Roy Chaudhary
is a young mediaperson in Mumbai, keen to practice journalism with meaning,
journalism that makes a difference to humanity and is aimed at the larger good.
The chasm separating what she wants to do (unearth corruption, for instance)
and what she is allowed to by her video news agency (interview Sunny Leone,
cover Ripley’s-Believe-It-Or-Not kind of drama) seems unbridgeable, and so she
spends her life cribbing about...well...her life.
Then one day Noor
catches a newsbreak that she is convinced will make her. In mishandling that
report though, she ends up ruining people who matter to her and almost
finishing herself.
Director Sunhil
Sippy’s Noor is about her reparation
and how she gets her world back on track. It is based on the book Karachi: You’re Killing Me by Saba
Imtiaz. The screenplay is by Althea Delmas-Kaushal, Shikhaa Sharma and
Sippy himself, with dialogues by Ishita Moitra Udhwani.
Before going into a
deeper analysis of this film it is important to get this out of the way: the
past year has seen a steady flow of self-consciously ‘women-centric’ films in
theatres. Most have been hollow, with zero story and zero understanding of or
commitment to women. Their sole goal appears to have been to cash in on what
the industry sees as a “trend” of women-centric films – like the best Vidya Balan starrers – making big money at the box office. Yes, the makers of such
films see women as a “trend”, not people (like men) with lives that are big-screen-worthy
for all seasons. The result: they have ended up
delivering self-defeating emptiness with thin screenplays and poorly developed
female leads, the worst of them being the Sonakshi Sinha-starrer Akira last year. Noor, which too features Sinha in the lead, is thankfully about a
story and a woman with a story worth telling, not about Akira-style fake ‘woman-centricity’.
This is what makes
Noor watchable despite its flaws, of which there are many. Sippy’s
28-year-old heroine is a believable creature for the most part, often utterly
stupid but also credible. She is more than the cutesy froth with which she is
introduced to us – messy, always in a hurry, always late, cocksure, tying her
hair with the first thing she can find even if that thing happens to be a sock,
anxious to have a boyfriend, anxious about her weight, serious in the hours
beyond her hard-partying social life. She is more than all the above because
Noor has clearly thought out, clearly articulated feelings, goals and dreams,
and the screenplay enables us to truly get to know this crazy woman in all her
crazy, mixed-up glory.
Just when you think
Noor is headed in the direction of being yet another Bridget Jones (meaning: a
character written with a veneer of liberalism but no real pre-occupation beyond
worrying about her next boyfriend and her next lay), the writing team thankfully goes elsewhere.
Noor speaks lines
mirroring the language of a real youngster from her background in Mumbai – for the
most part. I repeat “for the most part” here too, because her “tu”, “tumhara” and casual impertinence towards her fatherly editor-owner
is pretentious wannabe coolth authored by someone who seems to have a rather irritating stereotypical notion of how news offices function. It is
a major flaw in a film that is otherwise not overtly trying to impress.
Noor’s botched-up big break provokes us to think of
the ephemeral impact of news coverage not backed by commitment and follow-ups.
What happens when the cameras go away and real human beings are left to their
own devices, at the mercy of the powers that be just as they were before the
spotlight fell on them? This is the overriding takeaway from the film, which makes even
its failings forgivable.
Sonakshi Sinha
pulls off her character without appearing to try too hard. Her natural
performance as Noor once again raises the question: why does she waste herself primarily on Akshay Kumar starrers and the like that demean women and relegate
her to being no more than a pout and large eyes and an attractive profile?
The supporting cast
is interesting. Kanan Gill and Shibani Dandekar both have attractive
personalities and it would be nice to see if they can pull off larger roles.
M.K. Raina as Noor’s Dad is a sweetheart. In fact, the film might have
benefited from exploring his character further. Manish Chaudhari brings depth
to his performance as Noor’s boss, even if the
treatment of her relationship with him leaves much to be desired.
The pick of the
cast though is the
wonderful Smita Tambe playing a poor woman caught between a corrupt
system and irresponsible journalism.
The film’s pluses
do not eclipse its minuses though. Its news office milieu is poorly sketched,
and while showing Noor re-reporting a news story that was treated cursorily at
first, it does not bother to explain what “research” she added to it beyond
saying that she did. Such superficiality takes away from the film’s good
intentions.
Towards the end,
when it seems like Noor is about to lose her way again, this time to become a conformist,
a senior tells her: Having found yourself with such
difficulty, are you already forgetting that self? It is an excellent line
perfectly placed in the film. Unfortunately, it
can equally be applied to Sippy’s approach to this work. Just as he has
convinced us that Noor is a person of substance who is complete unto herself,
he quickly slaps a romance on to his storyline, as if to hurriedly satisfy
conventional Hindi film viewers who may consider a romantic interest an
essential part of any film and more conservative
viewers who consider a woman incomplete without
a man. Worse, he then wraps up his film with an ‘item’ song in which Noor
dances in a little dress and is pushed around by a man, as women tend to be in
formulaic Hindi films.
C’mon, Mr Sippy,
why not go all the way? Why be apologetic about the point you make?
That said, I would
still like very much to see the director’s next film. This is his return as a helmsman after a gap of 17
years (I confess I have not managed to find
his first film, Snip!, released
in 2000). Here is hoping that Film No. 3 is more confident of itself and we do
not have to wait another 17 years for it.
Ditto for Sonakshi Sinha. Four
years have flown between the remarkable Lootera
and Noor which,
despite its follies, serves as a good showcase for her talent. Here is hoping
we do not have to wait another four years for a film that does not treat her
like a prop.
Rating
(out of five stars): **1/2
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CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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116 minutes 24 seconds
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This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noor_(film)
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