Shyam Benegal a director well known for his alternate/art movies directs Welcome to Sajjanpur. The movie is about a little village in India called Sajjanpur with a lot of colorful characters.The story revolves around Mahadev (played by Shreyas Talpade) who is one of the few literate persons in the village. He is an aspiring novelist who is the letter writer for the entire village. Kamala (played by Amrita Rao) is Mahadev's childhood crush and a married woman whose husband works in the city and she is waiting for her husband to settle down so that she can join him.
She asks Mahadev to read and write letters from and to her husband and since Mahadev is interested in Kamala he decides to use his letter writing to create some misunderstanding between husband and wife.
The other characters in this village also consist of a compounder Ram Kumar (played by Ravi Kishen) who loves a child widow Shobha (played by Rajeshwari Sachdev), the superstitious Ram Sakhi ( played by Ila Arun) who wants her "Manglik" daughter Vindhya (played by Divya Dutta) married at any cost.Kunal Kapoor makes a cameo appearance towards the end of the movie as Bansi.
All the characters in this movie seemed very believable and real.The situations in the movie do not seem very contrived and the songs do not feel forced although they could have probably cut down on a couple of them in the interest of the length of the movie.
Although the movie has some touching scenes (especially the one at the railway station between Mahadev and kamala and the scene when Mahadev realizes that Bansi is a nice person and regrets his actions) and some really serious sequences, on the whole the movie has a light hearted feel to it. Shreyas Talpade effortlessly performs in his role and gets into the skin of the role of Mahadev flawlessly.
Music by Shantanu Moitra is in keeping with the feel of the movie. Ek Meetha and Bheeni Bheeni are two soft romantic songs that will linger in your hearts.
On the whole this movie was a nice change of pace from the usual run of the mill movies with foriegn locales and even more foriegn characters and sequences.Worth one watch for those who like watching off beat movies.
Rating
3/5
Oct 1, 2008
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4 comments:
Shyam Benegal never disappoints! I really liked this one. It felt like we were watching real-life in a village. Didnt get why they all spoke in that accent though. Bollywood villages seem to always speak in that accent no matter where they might be situated - as if everybody in rural India speaks in a faux Bihari/Easter UP accent!!
Good movie.Talpade has done well and for this reason he bagged the prize and get a chance to add that movie as a hit one in his career.It's his 1st sole hit movie.Somebody can say about OSO but SRK was tre in OSO.
I agree about the accent all hindi movies showing a village seem to depict that same accent :-)
I am not sure but I believe that Shreyas Talpade's debut movie Iqbal was also quite appreciated,not sure if it was a success at the box office though :-)
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