"Morning Raga" tells the very dramatic story of a Carnatic singer, Swarnalata
(Shabana Azmi), who loses her little son and her close friend, who's also her
violinist-accompanist, in a bus accident.
Twenty years after the calamity, the dead woman's son Abhinay (Prakash Rao) returns
to the village to open up hardly healed wounds.
The light touch that Dattani lends to the inherently dramatic plot is a marvel
of creative restraint. The narrative is carpeted with pastel shades of emotions
and a surprisingly large amount of humour ladled out gently, like the subtle strains
of the tanpura wafting softly into a room quivering with hushed voices.
""Morning Raga"" is a raga recital played out at a tenor that's
as gentle as the breeze blowing through the Andhra Pradesh village where Swarnalata,
stoic in her grief-stricken remembrance of the past, comes face to face with her
dead friend's adamant son.
""My mother did a lot for you. She's gone. But I'm here...or maybe that
doesn't mean anything to you,"" Abhinay mocks the proudly grieving singer,
prodding awake her most precious and indelible memories, provoking her into jazz-raga
sessions with her friend's adamant son.
In this way she finds a son she lost, while the young man rediscovers a mother
whose memory he embraced all his life.
The fact that the boutique owner's (Lilette Dubey) daughter Pinky (Perizaad Zorabian)
is stricken with guilt because the fateful bus accident 20 years ago had been
caused by her drunken father is a thematic device that tries a trifle too hard
to dilate the circle of destiny into a neat cyclic package. But then not everything
in art need be perfect to be authentic. |
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