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Exclusive Movie review/Pics: Peepli Live |
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Views: 4311
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Rating: 
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Exclusive Movie review/Pics: Peepli Live |
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Views: 4311
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Thread Tools |
Rating:
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#1
08-13-2010, 07:08 AM
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Exclusive Movie review/Pics: Peepli Live
 Review by Saibal Chatterjee - A television crew intrudes into a village hutment and plonks a camera bang in the middle of its cramped, messy space. It is looking for an exclusive, TRP-boosting ‘conversation' with a suicidal farmer. The latter, dread and bewilderment writ large on his face, cringes in a corner of the room. 
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#2
08-13-2010, 07:09 AM
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 The star reporter, doing her best to exude sympathy, seeks to assuage the man's fears. "Don't be afraid," she says. "This camera cannot do anything." Well, the TV cameras do an awful lot of things in Peepli Live, and not all of it is of a salutary nature.
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#3
08-13-2010, 07:09 AM
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 Writer-director Anusha Rizvi's debut feature, a disarmingly simple but remarkably powerful film, is a major triumph. She taps into the power of the medium to narrate a story rooted firmly in the depressing realities of rural India, but without ever going into paroxysms of self-righteous indignation.
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#4
08-13-2010, 07:09 AM
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 Peepli Live lampoons an entire range of usual suspects – voyeuristic media persons, smarmy bureaucrats, scheming local-level political goons and self-serving rulers, all of whom want a piece of the sleepy village where a farmer is about to **** himself so that his family can survive. Thanks to the film's nifty blend of humour and bathos, it does not slip into diatribe mode. It instead acquires the spiky edge of a pulsating yet biting satire. Rizvi collates elements from the theatre of the absurd to craft her sly portrait of a grim scenario that urban Indian moviegoers are rarely, if ever, exposed to.
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#5
08-13-2010, 07:09 AM
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 The film explores the clinical and incongruous response of the media and the ruling establishment to what is a life and death question for a farmer on the brink of becoming just another statistic in a never-ending tale of woes. This coldness is best captured in the nonchalant refrain of the natty agriculture secretary: "we must wait for the court's order." The peasant-protagonist Natha (amateur actor Omkar Das) cannot wait. He and his elder brother, Budhia (Raghuvir Yadav), are in danger of losing their plot of land, having failed to repay a bank loan.
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