A mention in the Guinness Book of Records is a distinct possibility in Priyanka Chopra's immediate future. So is a hit in her What's Your Raashee? She plays 12 different roles in it. The Ashutosh Gowariker romantic comedy helps to bring the curtain down on yet another wonderful TIFF, the 34th Toronto International Film Festival.
Priyanka plays the unbelievable dozen in a story of Yogesh Patel (Harman Baweja) rushing back to India from Chicago, responding to the inevitable "Papa's got a heart attack." Papa is actually fine and insistent for inheritance reasons that Yogesh pick a suitable girl and marry. In 12 days!
Gowariker's creative intuition has led him to cast Priyanka as each of the 12 girls whom Yogesh sees. She does remarkably, from playing an urbane sophisticate to a middle-class lass who replies "No manson" to "Thank you".
Road, Movie
Cameron Bailey, co-director of TIFF and its selector of Indian films, said, "Here's a film that embraces two of cinema's greatest pleasures, the open road and the love of movies, for their own sake."
Road, Movie is a real-surreal tale. Vishnu (Abhay Deol) flees a life of selling Daddy's desi hair oil brand and seeks India's vast open spaces in the deserts of Gujarat-Rajasthan. He rattles across them in a battered 1940s cinema van, picks up a runaway boy (Mohammad Faisal Usmani), a rotund, garrulous Mr Fix-It (a brilliant Satish Kaushik), and a beautiful wanderer and widow (Tannishtha Chatterjee).
The film is about the road and the movies. Hence the comma in its title. The glory of cinema is magically evoked, as is a recurring theme in Benegal's work, the world's impending water crisis.
TIFF always ends with the joy of great cinema seen and the regret of a great deal missed — inevitable, in this case, given the embarrassment of riches that this 34th TIFF has provided, with Steven Soderbergh, Joe and Ethan Coen, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Terry Gilliam, Margerethe von Trotta, Alain Resnais, Marco Bellocchio, Lars von Trier, Manuel de Oliviera and Amos Gitai. What to do? There's always the 35th.
