SHANGHAI - Dibakar Banerjee's collision or collusion...

Vasilis Vasilikos nouvella 'Z' and Gavras' adaptation of it demanded a deeper penetration into the matter of riding on the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) by Mr. Dibakar Banerjee. Superfluous in structure and an unduly serious tone is an adage anticipation to the capitalism one-liner 'the rich get richer and the poor get poorer' ala 'law of increasing poverty'. The entire film acts like a hypodermic syringe model trying too hard through its disruptive style of presenting an age old fact - futility of man versus machine. 

A close friend's view which hits hard on such films attempting to be a New Wave in Indian cinema. Ingredients for a 'new-wave' dish: 250 gms. of personal cinema, 100 gms. of rebelliousness, 50 gms. of political viewpoint, 50 gms. international acceptance, 100 gms. cinephilia and voila! - we have a New Wave. Someone needs to up the game here. 

A Tarantino roll over, a 'Bela Tarr' lengthy lateral track towards the end, shaky handheld camera to draw in the urgency - a new wave adage, a collusion of 'news reel footage' with cinematic footage, and an unending fallacy of the screenplay depicting the overriding situation - the adaptation merely serves as a backdrop and the issue is not ingrained as compared to 'Z'. 

Dibakar's film just serves as a corrupt CM's dream for SEZ. It's not an objective take where we as an audience go near the the people who are celebrating the SEZ and are ready to kill those who oppose it. Yes, Dibakar's superficial supplement for this is an overtly reused footage of the on-road celebrations carried on a stretch and edited out in bits to incorporate the timeline, of objectivity. 

'Shanghai' is a film we are all grown up with - from the advent of the 'Angry Young Man' iconic image of Mr. Bachchan. 'Z' is named after an iconic one-letter cry of Greek protestant, 'Grigori Lambrakis' but, here, our protestant stays in 'America' and just pays a casual visit to upholster his voice against the upcoming SEZ and gets crushed beneath a tempo. An uneasy silence but then we have our Masala Bollywood 'Good v/s Evil' beginning post interval, basically which is the underlying intention prior to a vague start, wrapped with Director of Yore 'Dibakar' packaging - a battle cry for Indian New Wave. ATTICA!

"Our problem is that we all love to opine, without much insight." That does not get us anywhere. Yes, we like to engage our democratic freedom in its most trivial form whenever we have a chance to - and so, all of us 'opine'.  I'd actually become a silent spectator to this environment, now.