| Such a Long Journey |
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| Rating: Good U.S. Distributor: The Shooting Gallery Running Time: 1 hour, 52 minutes U.S. Release Date: February 24th, 2000 Rating: Unrated Genre: Drama Director: Sturla Gunnarsson Cast: Roshan Seth, Soni Razdan, Om Puri, Naseerudinn Shah, Ranjit Chowdhry, and Sam Destor. |
| Plot: A father (Roshan Seth) who is basically a good person, but unaccepting and rigid is set through quite a mess in order to attain better form. His wife (Soni Razdan) is a good person who can't stand to see the father and his oldest son fight. The family is beset with a large number of problems including the oldest son moving out, the daughter's sickness, an old friend of the father coming back to ask a dangerous favor, a religious artist who is content but poor leads the father to help him out of guilt, his brother who is mentally disturbed needs help, the father's coworker is a flirtacious troublemaker who gets sick, and I think that about sums that all up. These subplots all of course find resolutions as the film moves along. |
| Critique: Such a Long Journey is a muddy and unfocused bunch of subplots that often find no relation with one another, and are too compact. The director is attempting to adapt the novel into a layered film, but only creates unconnected storylines that add up to be too busy, with unfurfilling resolutions. It is uneven, and pretentious, not to mention melodramatic, especially as the film draws to a close. I will give the film this compliment though, it managed to be mildly entertaining and engrossing enough to keep the viewer entertained. Although, it is a film with large gaping flaws it works only because of the thick likable personallities that seem real enough. Our main characters growth as a human being is the main point of the film and although it doesn't really affect the audience with the force or touching believability it desires it still feels like we have been through quite a bumpy strange ride. The plot is far from cliched, and even though it doesn't know how to deal with its twists they are interesting. However, the acting was a little cliched even though the script paints interesting characters it doesn't quite know how to pull them together. We therefore doubt the objective of the film, but as I say the characters are so interesting that we'll sit through the film anyway. Altogether this is not the film it aspires to be, its muddled pretensions are unfurfilling, but as a film it is a fun ride due to the characters. If you are willing to brush a few things off it should work fine for you, but I wouldn't go in excepting everything to be layed out just the way you would prefer. It is a movie that is good enough to recommend. Review by supernothingman, to reply or ask questions please email me at [email protected] |