So there was a snore in the seat next to mine. The audience gave a derisive applause at the end of Vikramjit Singh’s debut film Roy, and laughed when a lovelorn heroine gasped with joy and fell into the arms of her lover and spoiler alert, merged into a painting that was at the heart of a heist. But really, the issue with Roy is not that it is a bad film. The issue is that it does not conform to commercial cinema’s diktats (song and dance sequences, linear story line) most of the time and when it does, it does so badly. Sample this. A young, supposedly cerebral filmmaker Ayesha (Jacqueline Fernandez) is on the verge of falling for another charismatic filmmaker who like her is shooting in Malaysia. She sits at a roadside cafe and suddenly a local singer begins to croon something modelled after Baby Doll Main Sone Ki. Yes, the song is in Punjabi and is infectious enough to suck our intellectual heroine into the beat of, “Chittiyan kalayian.”
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This is the same woman who looks down upon commercial cinema and wonders if hit films have scripts. Also for a film that revolves around an art heist, the film despite its stunning production values that drip money, gives us supposedly coveted paintings that are abysmally bad. There is still a lot to like in the film. That scene where Ayesha and Kabir (Arjun Rampal) are alone on a beach and she has just this evening with him. Between snatches of conversation, she tells him she always wanted to be a ballet dancer but could not be because she had stage fright and as he watches her, she floats, leaps, lives a fantasy for an audience of one. Or that scene, when he harried and devastated by the finality of Ayesha’s goodbye, on his way to the airport watches her in a cab. He does not try to catch her eye one last time but when his cab moves ahead, rolls down his window and waves his hand in a silent farewell. She just sees the hand in the traffic ahead, not knowing just who is saying a goodbye and to whom but it is a moment of great poignancy.
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Or that scene when Kabir buys a pack of cigars for his dying father and then from his bedside, picks up the watch he had been gifted to understand the value of time but had refused to take it. Or his scenes with his dog who loves him unconditionally regardless of what is happening with his life. The dense green Malaysian forests and windswept, stormy beaches are captured beautifully by cinematographer Himman Dhamija and atleast one song Tu Hai Ki Nahin is haunting and picturised beautifully.
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Arjun Rampal. Typecast as most goodlooking actors are as a non performer, he can pull off more than he is given credit for. Remember him in Tehzeeb where he played a husband caught between his sensitive wife and her domineering mother? Or Rock On? It is sad that he has not been given enough material where he can be central to the scheme of things but in this film he is and does a credible job. As a self-absorbed arrogant director who is then lost without a story and a woman he has come to love deeply, he is far more interesting to watch than Ranbir Kapoor who sleepwalks through the film with a vacant face and empty eyes as a character in whom fiction and fact meld to a point where it is impossible to say where one begins and the other ends.
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Fernandez though gloriously beautiful whether she is doing Yoga on the rocks or just reading a book in a bar, has been asked to play two characters. She is more interesting as a bohemian film maker who wears glasses, multiple rings and tattoos, sports clothes tailored to her character to the last asymmetrical hem but ruins it all the moment she opens her mouth. Her face is beautiful but here is that word again…empty. The story of a creator and his creation driving each other till they reach a fitting ending is interesting but needed tighter editing but what works against the film but fascinated me is the way long silences are explored, conversations unfold without any hurry to get anywhere and defy the hurried and noisy scripting we have become used to in our cinema.
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Watching Roy is like going on a long holiday on an emerald isle where little, unscripted moments like watching the sea, lying on wet sand, going on a long drive on a road to possibly nowhere matter more than a water-tight to-do list.
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Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be silent with her cats.