Love Songs Review

Here's a review of the recent released Indian-English Film Love Songs, originally published in Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 14, Dated April 12, 2008
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QUITE OFF-KEY
Barring one scene, much of the film is a tiresome burden to bear. Mallika Sarabhai would do well to refrain from watching herself, writes THANI on the film Love Songs



JAYABRATO CHATTERJEE’S Love Songs — Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow reminds me of two French films: Christophe Honore’s Love Songs and Claude Lelouch’s And Now, Ladies & Gentleman. Honore’s Love Songs is a film about a lover expected to mourn his girlfriend’s death at a time when he’s realizing that he didn’t love her enough in the first place, while Lelouch’s film is laced with soulful songs punctuating an endearing romance between a singer (singer-actress Patricia Kaas) nursing a badly broken heart and a master thief (Jeremy Irons) on a reform spree.

Jayabrato Chatterjee’s Love Songs is a film about three generations of adults falling in and out of love. It is not clear, though, as to why the film calls itself Love Songs. Jaya Bachchan’s character Mridula, narrates entire chunks of the events in the film to her grandson, Rohan (Prithviraj Choudhary) and his paramour, Tara (Deol Basu), as if she was reading aloud from a letter. They huddle together in a hug in the film’s finale to form the publicity poster. “Love Letters” would’ve been a more apt title.

The film takes a considerable while before we figure who’s who, and what they’re doing in the film. Mridula (Jaya Bachchan) is a matriarch who has raised her daughter Palaash (Shahana Chatterjee) as a single parent. When her daughter’s marriage is falling apart, Mridula becomes the target of unintended abuse and is allowed no time to deal with her own life and the secret love that the daughter could be a by-product of. When Palaash dies, it falls upon Mridula to raise her daughter’s son, Rohan, as a single (grand)parent all over again, and it is for him that past events must be made sense of. Om Puri plays Aftab Jaffery, Mridula’s lost-andfound love from a remote past, who is unhappily married to a ghazal-singing alcoholic (Mallika Sarabhai).

The best sequence in the film is the one in which young lovers Rohan and Tara are going up the stairs of the Coffee House in College Street in Kolkata where, for the solitary occasion in the film, its visuals, soulful music, and background score fall in place. The rest of the film is a tiresome burden to bear.

Mallika Sarabhai would do well to refrain from watching herself in the film, to avoid descending into chronic depression. The same could be said of the others too, depending on where the actors have decided to pitch their acting bar. The cinematography is very functional and Usha Uthup’s music resonates only in places where songs make sense in the film.

It seems as if there aren’t enough competent practitioners of meaningful cinema for starved audiences in India.
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