Review: 'Shaala' (Marathi)

Film: Shaala (Marathi)

Director: Sujay Dahake

Cast: Anshuman Joshi, Ketan Pawar, Ketaki Mategaokar, Dilip Prabhavalkar, Santosh Juvekar, Jitendra Joshi, Amruta Khanvilkar

Rating: ***1/2

 

Remember that feeling when you’re driving to someplace and you happen to take the road that once led to your school. The hair on the back of your neck shivers slightly, there’s a knot in your belly, and there’s a nervous sense of having forgotten something and yet you feel a sense of longing. You look out the window of your car and you hope to see a familiar face.

 

As I rushed to take the fastest route to the theater to watch Sujay

Dahake’s film co-incidentally, I passed by my own shaala or school. So those feelings were rather fresh as the film opened.

 

Set against the backdrop of the Emergency years, the film takes us back to our own school days with terrifying teachers, missed homework, exams, puppy love and more. The film is the story of a bunch of Std IX students who struggle to make sense of the world within and the world outside.

Mukund Joshi (Joshi) is besotted with Shirodkar (Mategaonkar) and spends school-afternoons staring at her and smiling sheepishly while teachers go about their business. He gathers with his friends at a local building, under the pretext of completing homework and the gang shares their respective infatuations, problems. The story is based on Milind Bokil’s 2004 novel of the same title.

 

The story is simple, with many a sub-plots, innocent moments, what makes it interesting is the ingenuity with which the child actors deliver what is expected of them. Inspite of a stellar star cast, Dahake makes sure that the child actors do not get overshadowed. Prabhavalkar plays the strict principle while Juvekar is the friendly teacher who lets students play

‘Bhendya’ a version of hangman. Khanvilkar plays a sexy teacher, while Devika Daftardar plays a tyrant teacher who wields a ruler and stands metaphorically for Mrs Gandhi perhaps.

 

Shaala is dedicated to anyone who went to school. It means to create nostalgia and it succeeds on that count. The benches, the sound of the bell does bring back those memories. Daftardar’s character brings back the repressed anger and resentment towards violent teachers, but most of all, the dialogue brings back those moments spent before a class began or the moments spent walking to the school.

 

Shaala explores sensitive issues without getting melodramatic about it, with a simple innocent point of view, much like a child’s imagination. Dahake along with writer Avinash Deshpande handles the film with a mature, aesthetic sensibility one wishes to see often in Marathi cinema. And for that, Shaala scores extra points. A 2011 release that did rounds of the festival circuit, Shaala got a commercial release this week.

 

Go watch it for a few laughs, a few smiles and to share a few high-fives. Watch it because it will be one of 2012’s best Marathi films.