16th Annual NEW YORK INDIAN FILM FESTIVAL May 7 - 14, 2016
REVIEWS
india Anu Menon’s “Waiting” will Keep you Waiting
Waiting: it’s a brutal act, tiresome as it transpires and often ending in disappointment. It’s fitting then, that director Anu Menon’s (“London Paris New York,” “X: The Past is Present”) latest film should bear that title, as the process of watching it can be described as similarly exhausting.
It’s the story of retired professor Shiv (Naseeruddin Shah) and 20-something Tara (Kalki Koechlin), who meet in a Cochin hospital where Tara’s husband has just been admitted in a coma and where Shiv’s wife has lain in one for months.
It’s made immediately and abundantly clear that the two couldn’t be standing on further poles of their generational divide. Mild mannered Shiv has been married 40 years, hates shopping malls, and has never heard of Twitter. A whirlwind of erratic emotion, newlywed Tara is the stereotypical modern, tradition-shunning Indian woman; if we can’t gather that from her blue nails, heavily-lined eyes, and profanity-laced vocabulary, her staunch declaration of being an atheist should hammer it home. In their shared state of limbo, as they await the fate of their loved ones, they form an unlikely friendship. Shiv warns Tara of the dangers of lingering in a depressive state of grief and coaxes her to join him in his Zen zone of acceptance.
But even as the characters learn to tolerate the wait, it’s Menon who seems impatient to make the most of that time, cramming it with as many larger themes and statements as possible. Shiv and Tara’s overtly opposite personality traits are just the tip of a narrative that crumbles underneath the weight of the ideas it attempts to represent, each scene sagging with an unnecessarily preachy air. Shiv’s inability to afford climbing hospital bills gives way to his lecture on money-leeching insurance companies. Tara resenting her friends’ lack of support becomes an undisguised critique of the superficiality of relationships among today’s youth, for whom connections don’t extend beyond the digital realm. The slimy head surgeon (Rajat Kapoor), whose well-practiced approach to delivering bad news reeks with insincerity, becomes a symbol of the dark side of the medical system, setting off an overchoreographed deliberation on the ethics of end-of-life treatment.
Even for a film centered on coping with grief—and despite mildly successful dollops of dry humor here and there—the film’s melancholic tone is especially heavy-handed and clunky. Even that could have been overlooked, or perhaps even understood, were it not for Menon’s relentless need to drench every scene with forced meaning rather than letting it play out for what it is and trusting that in the hands of performers as capable as Shah and Koechlin, the characters could unfold organically. As a result, the story digresses from Shiv and Tara as people as they, along with the rest of the cast, are reduced into prototypes, devolving from nuanced individuals to flag-bearers for various stances on moral and relational dilemmas. They’re all there to stand for something, to tell us something, to teach us something. Ironically, the loudness of those messages is what makes them difficult to truly hear.
A story spanning way more subjects than it has neither the narrative bandwidth nor the subtlety to handle, the film’s fairly brief 92-minute runtime is, therefore, anything but concise. Much too determined to be a “snippet of life” indie that will impart lessons on the value of human relationships, it instead drags us through the internal ordeals of characters we can’t sympathize with until we, too, are waiting until it’s all over.
“Waiting” screened at the New York Indian Film festival on Thursday, May 12. It is slated to release in Indian cinemas on May 27.
