Bala feels like dishonest filmmaking in the name of socially relevant cinema (and it becomes more evident in front of a less polished, simplistic, sleazy but relatively honest Ujda Chaman).
For a film that centres around the message of accepting and standing-up for oneself – whether balding or brown – it has its actress shining with ridiculous amounts of soot which varies from scene to scene, unabashed of its own dishonesty and hypocrisy. One could easily hear audience whispering in the backseat was how bad the make-up job was. Whatever message or normalising of conversation the story intends, the filmmaking works to reverse it.
(I imagine a conversation in my head talking to family how conversation around colour is getting better, citing Bala as an example, to which the first response that comes from their end is they couldn’t find an actress to play the dark-skinned girl).
Not everything with Ayushmann Khurana in a socially-relevant-North-Indian-accented-romantic-comedy is supposedly worthy.
Both films have a bald guy confronting and accepting his own balding and self-image in the backdrop of a marriage proposal when confronted with a confident girl socially discriminated due to other issues (Being dark-skinned in Bala, and obesity in Ujda Chaman).
Bala, for all it’s polished voice-overs, layering and acting, feels like filmmakers patting themselves on the back for telling a story about problems of being bald and dark-skinned. (And thus the film needs to lecture us every now and then, and repeat the same message with songs and an obvious courtroom scene with breakdowns, and rely on what Ebert calls an ‘Idiot plot’ in his movie glossary – hinging on a brief misunderstood conversation/missed message for central conflict).
Atleast the people behind Ujda Chaman had the sense and decency to cast a person according to the part – Manvi Gagroo’s character (Apsara) doesn’t even need to announce what she has faced in her life due to her physical appearance. One can simply tell.
hungryrj 