The "Gandhi" in Kishor Pandurang Belekar's Gandhi Talks refers to both the great Mahatma and money. The movie, for the most part, deals with the latter Gandhi as we see what crucial role cash plays in daily life. Money can buy you a judge, money can get you a job, and money can give you the confidence to ask the family of the girl you love for her hand in marriage. Without wealth, you would struggle to feed yourself and your family. You would have to pick up humiliating gigs for some cash, and you might even be forced to become a criminal.
Someone like Mahadev (Vijay Sethupathi) is one of those people. He lives in a chawl with his old mother (Usha Nadkarni) and wants to marry Gayatri (Aditi Rao Hydari), who lives in the opposite building. Gayatri, too, wants to marry Mahadev. It's just that he doesn't have a job yet, so he has not approached her mother to talk about marriage. Gayatri, though, is willing to wait. Mahadev might not be rich, but he is surrounded by people who love him and are kind to him—and I am not only referring to his mother and the woman he loves. I am also talking about a neighbor who doesn't scream at Mahadev when the latter steals food from his plate. The neighbor peeks through the window and takes pity on Mahadev's poor condition.
On the other hand, we have Mohan Boseman (Arvind Swamy). He was once a very successful businessman with a wife, a child, and a mother. Now he's bankrupt, and he has lost his family as well (they are dead). On top of this, the newspapers call him an alcoholic and a gambler. His character is publicly assassinated for the sake of sensationalism. The message Gandhi Talks seems to be giving is: "Money matters." It's with the help of moolah that Mohan manages to execute an escape plan with the help of a police officer (Govind Namdev). That is, until the movie begins to preach a Gandhian way forward toward the end, where dough is given to a poor man, and a character chooses an honest job as a cleaner rather than turning his life around with stolen cash. Even a colorful pickpocket (Siddharth Jadhav), who initially flaunts himself with money looted from people's purses—for instance, while mocking Mahadev from the comfort of a cab—is left with a scar on his back. The thief is taught a lesson, but the bigger thieves—like politicians and government officers—continue to sit comfortably in their ivory towers. Not everything changes. Still, through Mahadev, Gandhi Talks tries to nudge the common man onto the path of righteousness.
The movie, in other words, is a morality play with thin characters and a trite lesson. It's one of those dull dramas that mask their incompetence with good intentions. Belekar, though, goes one step further and makes a silent comedy-drama so that his efforts can be celebrated as a "bold step" in at least cinephilic circles. What's laughable is that Gandhi Talks is not exactly a silent film. We hear song lyrics, the sound of cellphones ringing, the noise of vehicles, and, of course, the background music. That last element was heard even in early silent movies, and during those days, screenings were often accompanied by live music. Most of those films, however, had intertitles, and while they are not present in Gandhi Talks, Belekar uses onscreen text and sometimes has characters write their thoughts on paper to convey the required information. Yet the one question you keep asking throughout the film is this: why did the director want this story to be silent—and silent in the sense that only the dialogues are omitted?
The early silent classics prove that movies don't need to be mere delivery mechanisms for the screenplay. The great filmmakers of that era—like Fritz Lang, D. W. Griffith, F. W. Murnau, and Sergei Eisenstein—highlighted the visual possibilities of the medium, while someone like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton performed daring physical feats that left—and continue to leave—the audience mesmerized. The difference between them and Belekar is that the former challenged and pushed the boundaries of the cinematic art form, while Belekar imposes plenty of limitations on himself. There is nothing in silent movies that modern sound films cannot replicate. Sound, in fact, can be used to heighten a movie's visual language. Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Godard, and even the early Spielberg took our breath away with the interplay of sound and images. Belekar, however, is neither interested in exploring the power of sound nor images. He instead bores you with scenes that are direct—and literal—page-to-screen translations. The one piece of good news, I guess, is that by not providing his characters with a voice, Belekar saves himself from also being labeled an awful dialogue writer. Given the story he has cooked up and the bland aesthetics that even squash Hydari's radiance, it doesn't seem as if the people on the screen would have won you over with their voices or their confessions. It's very much possible that the lines would have been equally generic, equally unmemorable as everything else on display.
Nonetheless, I wish Belekar had given voice to his characters because his faux-silent effort comes across as a stunt—an ostentatious endeavor for festival (and some critical) acclaim. Without dialogues, the movie feels more frustrating because their absence doesn't make complete sense. Gandhi Talks is devoid of visual panache and wittiness. It's also a terrible waste of talented actors. This crummy, conventional "experiment" is filled with annoying silences.
Written by - Vikas Yadav
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Publisher at Midgard Times