"A day
will soon come when human beings will be offered
at a discount." This is one among umpteen
acidic one-liners (Joglekarisms?) thrown at random
by award-winning author Dasrath Joglekar (Nana
Patekar) in Goutam Ghose's Yatra. It
is a pointer to the future of everything man has
created – cinema, literature, music, dance,
et al. This defines the essence of the film. Or
does it? The 'journey' here is multi-layered and
multi-dimensional – touching a myriad of
sub-plots from the supposed disappearance and
subsequent metamorphosis of the traditional nartaki
, to the Americanization of call centres, to the
unique concept of literature published and marketed
by a major steel manufacturing company that also
sponsors a prestigious literary award function,
to Feng Shui, to farmer suicides (whew!). It takes
potshots at the shopping mall culture, at the
call centre industry, at MMS hard porn concocted
by young men of their sessions in bed with their
couldn't care less girlfriends and at politicians
looking down the cleavages of young women.
Dasrath Joglekar is a famous writer whose new
novel, Janazaa, has won a prestigious
literary award. At home, he has an over-adoring
family in the shape of a widowed mother (Bharati
Devi), wife Sharada (Deepti Naval), daughter Sohini
(Anandi Ghose) and son Iman Kalyan (Romit Raaj.)
He insists on travelling by train to Delhi for
the award ceremony and meets young filmmaker Mohit
(Nakul Vaid) on the way. This marks the beginning
of a triangle of possibilities – the writer
gets into a dialogue with the filmmaker about
how his novel, a fictionalized account of the
tragic story of Lajwanti, is a largely romanticized
and diluted version of the pain and the struggle
she experiences in real life. As he begins the
narration, Mohit offers his inputs as a filmmaker,
explaining how a given scene would be composed,
orchestrated, choreographed and edited. But these
possibilities are left unexplored because the
camera decides to telescope back and forth in
time, taking the audience on a journey into the
life of Lajwanti. Lajwanti (Rekha), a nartaki,
who forms the backbone of the story, once an exponent
of the mujra dance and song routine, is now reduced
to performing lewd item numbers to Hindi film
hits to an ugly, leering group in a seedy bylane
of old Hyderabad.
 Before
he boards the train to Delhi, Joglekar has begun
his next novel, Bazaar. His conversations
and monologues generously spiked with sarcasm
and satire, keep harping on the marketability
of everything in contemporary life from a litterateur's
response to his award to a television journalist,
to the coordinator's (June Malliah) inadequate
knowledge of Hindi to…. well, the less said,
the better.
Yatra unwittingly rubs the film's producers,
SPS Arts and Entertainment Limited, (an offshoot
of a major steel manufacturing company,) the wrong
way up. It actually inserts an already well-known
ad of the company with a Mumbai star as the model,
into the award function, as the company that has
published Janaza and has also sponsored
the award function. The strategy misfires, throwing
up the production company as one that is brazenly
trying to boost its manufacturing image (steel
producers) with the added dimension of a cultural
one (producing films). But then, it also fits
neatly into the groove of Joglekar's next novel,
Bazaar.
Somewhere along the way, the focus gets lost
in a host of sub-plots. Is Yatra designed
to be a platform for the second innings of Umrao
Jaan (1981), a la Lajwanti, a la Rekha, in
her globalised, 50+ avatar? If this be true, then
Rekha has done a brilliant job except in the climactic
scenes when she goes into hysterics of grief through
Kathak twirls on the floor! Her item number Kabhi
Aar Kabhi Paar can easily make the likes
of Raakhee Sawant run for cover.
Questions remain. Lajwanti's dance costumes are
exorbitantly expensive in style, design and cost.
If she can afford it, what makes her remain in
the dungeons of Mehendi Galli? She walked out
in disgust from her patron Pulla Reddy's court
in protest against his leering friends looking
up under her skirt as she danced. In her Miss
Lisa avatar, isn't she playing up to a similar
gallery in a coarser way? Or, has time changed
her priorities?
One wonders whether the film is aimed at stripping
poor Nana Patekar of his marginal man stereotype
by casting him as a littérateur of renown.
But Patekar, with that deadpan expression and
his deadpan voice, fails to deliver. The way he
indulges himself in the bottle at all times of
day and night and forgets to wash it down with
his regular dose of Sorbitrate, makes one wonder
about when he really puts pen to paper. He often
breaks into splitting laughter without rhyme or
reason and comes across as an irresponsible, rude
and arrogant rascal hell-bent on talking down
to people even in his fantasies. Looking back,
he is nothing more than an intellectualized and
politicized version of the horrible Pulla Reddy.
The love, if there was any, between Lajvanti and
Satish/Joglekar is not fleshed out at all, making
for a rather unconvincing climax.
Joglekar's family is reduced to an awe-struck
fan club with the fractional exception of wife
Sharda raising a voice of protest against his
relationship with Lajwanti, albeit, in flashbacks.
Though Joglekar is a Maharashtrian surname, in
the film, they are shown as Andhraites. In a fantasized
shot, at a call centre, an angry Sohini protests
when her boss insists she must pretend she is
Susan, an American. As she gets up in disgust,
crying out that she is Indian, she uses the Yankee
"F"-word to prove her point!
The Gautam Ghose signature however, makes its
strong presence felt all the way. The cinematography
sets a model lesson for posterity to follow. Samir
Chanda's production design, especially of the
narrow bylanes of Mehendi Galli, is brilliant.
Ditto for Anup Mukherjee's sound design. The music
composed by Ghose himself (credit shared with
Khayyam), carries his insignia of memories, post-modernity,
mujra music and the purely classical, though they
sometimes tend to disturb the narrative rather
than enhance it. Saroj Khan and Saswati Sen's
joint (?) choreography harks back to Umrao
Jaan. Yatra proves that brilliance
of technique and aesthetics can do little to rescue
a script with excellent possibilities gone haywire.
Not even tickets offered at a discount can save
this film.
Shoma A Chatterji is a freelance journalist
who specialises in cinema and gender. She has
won the National Award for Best Writing on Cinema
twice.
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