Photo-Prem
Directed by: Aditya Rathi, Gayatri Patil
Cast: Neena Kulkarni, Amita Khopkar, Vikas Hande, Chaitrali Rode, Sameer Dharmadhikar
The latest Marathi movie, Photo-Prem, on Amazon Prime Video, reminded me of a 2014 Tamil work called Mundasuppati (Turban Village). Here the villagers have a huge phobia of being photographed. The story goes that an old superstition about faces caught on camera will spell doom. The movie had a great climax with the village crowd chasing our hero, a photographer, as he runs away with his beloved on a two-wheeler. And the thing stops, and with a clever move he takes out his camera and points it at the angry mob, who turn and shoot twice as fast!
In Photo-Prem, aided by Aditya Rathi and Gayatri Patel, the main character, Sunanda, is also respectfully addressed as Maee (played by Neena Kulkarni), also camera-shy to the extent that she has a terrible fear of being captured through the lens – paranoia she has had since her teens. It’s never clear why she feels this way, and as she gets older and gets married, it’s revealed that she wasn’t even featured in her honeymoon photos. Her uncouth husband (Vikas Hande), who is in charge of her and hardly ever talks to her, complains in a scene that the honeymoon photos showed that he had gone all alone. The directors, who are also writers, take this a bit too far when Sunanda balks at being photographed, even during her own daughter’s wedding.
But this changes when Sunanda attends a woman’s funeral and finds her family running around looking for a photo of her for an obituary in the newspaper. Later, when Sunanda visits the woman’s house, she sees the photo of a young girl on the wall; it was clear that the family could not find a later photo.
This incident prompts Sunanda to reflect on her own death and how her grandchildren might remember her when there is no photo. And the rest of the film wanders through her attempt, punctuated by reluctance and a deep sense of inexplicable embarrassment, to get a picture of herself. This sudden obsession is not written with a sense of credible conviction.
And Photo-Prem seems such a hindrance, even with its relatively short 90-minute runtime, peppered as it is with pointless situations. Incidents such as an acquaintance who repeatedly addresses Sunanda in the street with questions, and her own daily conversations with her housekeeper are silly at best, and if the writers had thought it would lead to laughter, they couldn’t have been wrong.
There’s something to take away from the core plot, though, which seems to covertly criticize the modern world’s obsession with selfies and photos. But this has hardly been elaborated. What a pity!
Rating: 2/5
(Gautaman Bhaskaran is film critic and biographer of Adoor Gopalakrishnan)
Read all the Latest News, Breaking News and Coronavirus News here. Follow us on facebook, Twitter and Telegram.