Hawaa Hawaai

After the winsome realism of Stanley ka Dabba, Amole Gupte resorts to pure sentimentality

Inexplicably, Amole Gupte, who was shaping up as a very interesting director—with a style of subtle realism and a way of treating children as individuals, as convincingly as the Italian neo-realists once did—has succumbed to the lure of Hindi melodrama. Making Hawaa Hawaii after Stanley Ka Dabba is not the occasional stumble that filmmakers can be excused for; it is a compromise in values, in the very principles of what makes good cinema.

Gupte has consciously switched his film treatment, as if to say that realism with kids does not pay, so let’s try sentimentality. The film is about a bunch of slum kids who enviously watch rich kids learn how to skate. They have skates which cost as much as Rs 30,000 and are being trained by a professional skater (Saqib Saleem).

One of the street kids serves tea outside the skating rink, and his hands are full of blisters from the hot glasses. His name is Arjun (Partho Gupte) and he is the son of a farmer who was cursed by drought and barren fields in rural Maharashtra. This eventually led the family to migrate to the shanty towns of Mumbai.

The minute this scenario is presented, you know what’s going to happen. Arjun is going to overcome all the odds against him —every economic and social challenge— and become the skating champ. Which would still be fine, and might even have made a predictable but watchable movie, had the film not insisted on giving us kids who speak in cloyingly sweet and obviously rehearsed lines .

Partho Gupte is a naturally gifted actor, but even he struggles to rise above the mediocre cast of actors used as instruments in a social message, instead of being etched as living beings you can connect with.

After the poignant and masterful Stanley Ka Dabba, this movie is a huge disappointment.

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Ajit Duara