Mumbai: As the mythological drama ‘RadhaKrishn’ has concluded after completing 1,145 episodes. Lead actors Sumedh Mudhgalkar and Mallika Singh, who played the lead roles of Lord Krishna and Radha, shared their experience of working for almost five years.
Sumedh said: “It has been a privilege to play the character of Lord Krishna as several popular actors have enacted this character. Initially, it was a mammoth task to crack the assignment, but eventually, I realised that it was my journey and it was a competition against myself.”
“It’s been almost five years, I have been associated with the show. Now the perceptions are changing, everything right from the set to the environment is changing. And suddenly you realise that you won’t be able to see these things again and thus you start appreciating them more. You suddenly feel emotional, I really cannot imagine my life after the show.”
The mythological show based on the story of Lord Krishna and Radha, which premiered on October 1, 2018, was considered among the longest-running shows and a prequel to it also started, titled ‘Jai Kanhaiya Lal Ki’ in 2021 and ended in July 2022.
Mallika, who played Radha recalled how tough it was initially for her to get into the skin of the character: “It was a wonderful experience to play the part of Radha, and I was overjoyed when I was offered the role in the TV series ‘RadhaKrishn’. At the initial stage, I found it a bit hard to cope but then gradually we had to multitask while getting into character, and I realised it was my journey where I learned a lot and adapted myself to all the challenges.”
“Now the long journey has come to an end where I am emotional but also happy that I’ve made innumerable memories as well as good experiences. Though it is difficult to accept the fact that the show has come to an end, we will miss the set and crew members of the show since each and every person of the show has put their best to make this show a success,” she concluded.
The Starling Girl, the feature debut from writer-director Laurel Parmet, sets forth two difficult, easily muddled tasks. First, striking the correct tonal balance for a sexual relationship separated by age and authority – in this case, an intoxicating, transgressive romance between 17-year-old Jem Starling (Eliza Scanlen) and her brusquely handsome, 28-year-old youth pastor Owen (Lewis Pullman, son of actor Bill). And the second, depicting an insular religious community – a group of fundamentalist Christians in present-day Kentucky – with enough specificity and emotional acuity to bridge the gap with viewers who will find such a place opaque, unrelatable or possibly even unbelievable.
Parmet succeeds more on the former than the latter. The Starling Girl, anchored by a bristling performance from the always solid Scanlen, is at its best when it hews to the combustible suspense of a teenage girl glimpsing her own instincts – for honesty, for autonomy, and most threateningly for pleasure. It’s ultimately less a portrait of a toxic relationship – that’s not the tone of Owen and Jem’s connection here – than a familiar battle of faith and feelings, intuition versus indoctrination, the fine line between sin and sublime.
Glance by glance, Jem is invariably drawn to Owen against the backdrop of shame-ridden conservatism. The two first reconnect on a stairwell outside church – Jem in snotty tears after a fellow congregant chastises her visible bra outline; Owen, recently returned from a missionary stint in Puerto Rico, the subject of gossip over why he and his wife (Jessamine Burgum) don’t have children yet. This is Duggar-type Christian fundamentalism – long skirts and covered shoulders, no social associations outside church and no secular culture.
The honeyed Southern summer setting, lushly captured by cinematographer Brian Lannin, feels expansive in a way Jem’s social and emotional futures do not. By day, she escapes into dance practice and solo bike rides at dusk, the air thick with humidity and crickets (characters are dripping in sweat on multiple occasions, often coinciding with a melting of control). By night, she experiments with masturbation and curses her sinful hand. One afternoon, her strictly devout mother (Wrenn Schmidt) and father (Jimmi Simpson), a former secular musician and addict whose recovery is thornily bound up in faith, inform her that it’s time for her to court Owen’s painfully sheltered brother Ben (Euphoria’s Austin Abrams), and that’s that.
Jem balks and bargains – it is never boring to watch Scanlen, most notably of Sharp Objects and Little Women fame, play a character whose inner fire scrabbles with her learned politeness, and whose lust is basically indistinguishable from a crucial curiosity about the world. This is where the casting gets tricky. Scanlen, who is 24, has such a deft handle on reckless, almost devious innocence that she can still pull off a high-schooler, but barely. In another movie, she and Pullman, who is 29, could play uncomplicated lovers. Last year’s Sundance standout Palm Trees and Power Lines managed to balance both the magnetism and grossness of a relationship between a 17-year-old girl and 34-year-old man largely through the casting of actual teenager Lily McInerny, who looked believably her age – as in, more child than woman, shockingly young.
The Starling Girl manages to skirt the issue of credulity by framing the central relationship as less toxic than desperate. Pullman capably plays Owen as somewhat of a Peter Pan with a visibly fractured psyche. Her instincts are nascent and powerful; his have been so stunted by shame as to resemble that of a teenager. The 116-minute film plays, however intentionally, like a genuine if deeply flawed connection, one whose inappropriateness is outdone by the merciless expectations inflicted by their community. When he takes her virginity in the backseat of a car, in an expertly staged scene that focuses on her thrill and disappointment, it feels both achingly teenage and ominous. He cannot conceive of her pleasure; she will of course pay for it.
Parmet maintains a firm grip on this slippery relationship throughout its doomed course, less so on their world – if the rules are so strict and the gossip so thick here, how could these two plausibly get away with time together? A side plot involving her father’s descent into alcoholism provides motivation for Jem to distrust her rigid world even more, but culminates in unnecessarily high stakes. The final act’s redemption feels almost gratuitous in its depiction of her family and community’s emotional cruelty. The conclusion is, thankfully, appropriately understated; Scanlen can portray miles of emotional growth with a few short minutes. Films of this tricky variety often hinge on the central performance, and in her hands, it mostly works.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
The third feature from Copenhagen-based Iranian director Ali Abbasi shares with his breakthrough film, the troll-thriller Border, a fascination with the monsters that lurk on the fringes of society. But in this Persian-language picture, based on a real-life serial killer who murdered 16 sex workers in the Iranian city of Mashhad, the monster is not just a single individual, but a wider culture of misogyny.
It’s a timely release, adding to the spotlight on women’s rights and roles in Iranian society, and driven by two impressive performances – from theatre actor Mehdi Bajestani as the murderer, and Zar Amir Ebrahimi, playing Rahimi, the female investigative journalist reporting on the case. It’s a tense, atmospheric piece of film-making but it made me profoundly uncomfortable – and not, I should add, in a good way. There’s a prurience in how the murders are filmed – the camera hungrily scouring the distorted faces of dying women – that borders on dehumanising. This, combined with the fact that it’s the female journalist, rather than any of the victims, whose character is developed, unintentionally supports the idea that some women’s lives are worth more than others.
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#Holy #Spider #prurient #Iranian #serial #killer #drama
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Cinema has traditionally had a rather dubious relationship with the subject of terminal disease. Imminent death is dressed up in a decorative swirl of romance; patients tend to remain photogenically asymptomatic until the last possible moment. But director and co-writer Emily Atef’s More Than Ever is different. This French and English-language drama is a film about taking ownership over the end of life; about dying personally and, if necessary, selfishly.
Vicky Krieps, so wonderfully frosty and autocratic in Corsage, shows another, more emotionally friable side of her considerable range as Hélène. Diagnosed with a degenerative lung disease, Hélène is struggling to come to terms with an aspect of her life – its cessation – that she is unable to fully share with her husband, Matthieu (the late Gaspard Ulliel in one of his final film roles). Finding it increasingly hard to deal with his desperate, dogged optimism, she turns to the internet, trawling through end-of-life blogs. There she finds a kindred spirit in “Mister” (Bjørn Floberg), who has cancer and whose mordant humour and irreverent approach chimes with her own. To Matthieu’s consternation, Hélène decides to visit Mister in his isolated home on the fringes of a fjord in Norway.
Atef (3 Days in Quiberon) neatly captures Hélène’s existential crisis in the juxtaposition between the vast possibilities of the Scandinavian landscape and the small, dark, stone-walled fisher’s shed in which she chooses to sleep; between the desire that Hélène still feels for her husband and the physical limitations that her disease places on her ability to express her sexuality. Ultimately, the key to a meaningful death is, the film argues, the same as in life: being true to yourself.
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#review #thoughtful #drama #die
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
