Masaan
Year: 2015
Director: Neeraj Ghaywan
Cast: Richa Chadha, Vicky Kaushal, Sanjay Mishra, Shweta Tripathi

Film festival feted movies have some common characteristics…they are serious, slow, depicting darker side of life, shunning commercial equations etc. etc.! Anurag Kashyap’s production house has come to specialize in such films and Cannes award winner Masaan is one more example of that.

Masaan is the colloquial equivalent of the Hindi word Shamshaan (the Hindu cremation ground) and the film deals with that theme, literally and metaphorically. It’s a tale of dead dreams of the young and restless in the midst of a dying old world!

Writer Varun Grover weaves together two unconnected life-stories of protagonists based in Banaras. The first story is of a young girl (Richa Chadha), a computer training institute instructor, whose secret romantic rendezvous with her student turns into an unending nightmare of police harassment and extortion. Her elderly father (Sanjay Mishra), an ex-university lecturer who is now making a living through religious rituals at the Banaras ghats, becomes an unwitting party to the ongoing ordeal, with the uneasy father-daughter relationship complicating matters further.

The other story shows a young engineering student (Vicky Kaushal), trying to leave behind his family’s centuries-old caste based profession of funeral pyre lighting. His budding romance with a ‘higher caste’ girl, instead of bringing happiness heaps on turmoil in his life.

As the two protagonists struggle to come to terms with their individual tragedies they find that while everything on ground is changing at a breakneck speed, the more the world changes, the more it remains the same.

The main appeal of Masaan is in its sensitive portrayal of the crumbling age-old culture in modern day Banaras. It subtly points out the moral complexities and contradictions in day-to-day ordinary lives; the lives which are trying to break free from the shackles of outdated traditions.

Neeraj Ghaywan’s assured direction and fine performances from Richa Chadha, Sanjay Mishra, Vicky Kaushal and Shweta Tripathi make this film worth a watch!