Watching BHRAM my mind races back to the mid-eighties when you made movies on videos. Where you launched actors like Deepshika, Jeet Upendra and Aditya Panscholi. They were not great movies but were good to watch and had interesting stories to tell. Of course, those days, videos were a craze and I guess those movies made big business. But BHRAM? I guess as the translation suggests, is just one big illusion. But was it an illusion when you set out to film this movie, or did it become one along the way when you realized there was no solid script? Really Mr Hira, what exactly did you set out trying to do? Was it a video movie you had in mind, or a broader canvass? Because when you see the movie, one can feel the small screen format in place. Most of the characters and sets are even dressed up the way a television set is, not a grand 70mm movie set. The dialogues, at best are juvenile, with Fs and Bs and hard-ons thrown in for impact. Sadly, you cringe when the characters mouth these so-called ‘adult dialogues’. There has to be finesses in the way the dialogues are mouthed and the characters have to be given a believable situation for them to speak the way they do. Watching Chetan Hansraj and Dino Morea and Sheetal Menon mouth Fs and Bs, I am taken back to my college days when this language was used to impress our peers; to announce loudly that you had ‘arrived’. But then you move on…. As for the characters, the less said the better. Sheetal Menon may be a good model, but she does not have that necessary skill to convey her presence on screen. Or I dare say she has not been presented well? Only Simone Singh stands tall among the ruins of this illusion.
