They can't step into Majidi's shoes

By SUDHISH KAMATH

Priyadarshan's take on Majid Majidi's Children of Heaven (this is the legal remake) reminds you about how shrewd milkmen sell milk in the villages. They add a little water to dilute the milk, of course.

In this case, the filmmaker has decided to add a little milk to his bucket of water.

The vague, obscure world of Priyadarshan fromBillu is back with all the more ambiguity. It's high time the filmmaker stopped trying to pass off the Nilgiris as some naxalite-infested, Bengali-speaking, cold mountainous region that a top sportswear brand considers a key market.

His characters speak a generic dialect of Hindi and the verbosity is too textbook and stiff to pass off as daily conversation. Also, it's difficult to even re-imagine that rampant commercialisation, consumerism and sponsorship would have reached Majidi's small town as gloriously as in the hyper-animated, exaggerated world of Bumm Bumm Bole.

In spite of retaining the key scenes from the original, breaking them down to exactly the same shots from the Iranian film, Priyadarshan is unable to maintain the tempo of Majidi's poignant masterpiece simply because the screenplay here lacks brevity and his direction, focus.

The original, with its 90-minute running time, had its agenda intact — how the children cope with the situation after the kid loses his sister's shoes.

Bumm Bumm Bole, in its never-ending 130-minute duration, throws up a good versus bad morality tale with a naxalite sub-plot that seems inspired by Tahaan, tries to exaggerate the father's dwindling fortunes by shifting him from one grave situation to another (here, Atul Kulkarni not just loses his job, he gets labelled a terrorist conveniently, meets with a serious multiple-fracture accident after his bicycle runs into a tree — not kidding).

Poor Darsheel Safary has quite a bit of load to carry on his shoulders with the sagging pace and unwarranted departures from Children of Heaven. Priyadarshan's biggest triumph is extracting a wonderful performance from the little Ziyah Vastani whose presence and smiles light up the slow, meandering film.

Girls in the hall went “So cute” every time this actor made an appearance, Ziyah stealing the thunder from right below Darsheel's nose. Local boy Omar Lateef turns in an impressive performance in a half-baked role, while Atul Kulkarni gets nothing to sink his teeth into, except a long rant to the cops on how they create terrorists.

The kind-hearted policeman rewards him with a three-thousand-rupee job, by the way. And the smart man buys two pairs of new branded shoes from his advance!

Yes, Priyadarshan takes a simple film about the spirit and innocence of children living without even the basic necessities and makes a case for a multinational brand and consumerism, of course. If this isn't selling out, what is?

Bumm Bumm Bole

Genre: Drama

Cast: Darsheel Safary, Atul Kulkarni, Rituparna Sengupta, Ziyah Vastani, Omar Lateef

Director: Priyadarshan

Storyline: A little boy loses his sister's shoes and they agree to share his torn sneakers to school (she could wear them in the morning and he could in the afternoon) to bail out their father who has just lost his job.

Bottomline: Takes rare talent to mess up a fine film despite remaking it shot by shot. This extended version of Majidi's Children of Heaven drags on and on