Waiting

IT IS REFRESHING to watch a film about two comatose patients in a hospital that is made without drama and with virtually no background music. It is also interesting to see two caregivers for these patients divided by a generation or two but connected by their grief. Shiv Kumar (Naseeruddin Shah), an elderly Professor in Cochin, has been caring for his wife ever since she went into coma some eight months earlier, while Tara Deshpande (Kalki Koechlin) has just rushed to the city after her husband was extricated from a car crash.

They talk and then end up helping each other cope with the endless waiting. The conversations between Shiv Kumar and Tara have an element of wry humor, based mostly on their difference in age, attitude and language, and are amusing mainly for the way Naseeruddin Shah plays his character, and for the way he reacts to Kalki’s. But the film lacks depth, firstly because of the poor writing given to the character of Kalki, which shows her as an awfully superficial stereotype of her age and background, and secondly, because apart from the waiting, the director has nothing more to add to the emotional resonance of her film. As a result, the concluding scenes of the film fail to impact us.

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Ajit Duara