Photograph review – restrained Mumbai romance never comes into focus

The Lunchbox director Ritesh Batra returns with an enigmatic meditation on chance meetings and things unsaid

Ritesh Batra stole the hearts of moviegoers the world over with his gentle romance The Lunchbox in 2013, and after some uncertain English-language movies he has returned to India with this odd, enigmatic high-concept love story set in Mumbai. Photograph has some beautifully shot moments, and Batra sometimes captures the city with something approaching the rapture with which Wong Kar-wai captures Hong Kong. Yet it is weirdly opaque and internalised, and doesn’t ever really come to life.

This is a romance in which the lovers do no more than briefly touch hands. They rarely even smile at each other, and their voices are hardly ever raised higher than a murmur. Photograph is elliptical, so much so that I almost suspect some scenes have been lost in the edit. The plot turns on a photograph that we never see. The lovers meet under extraordinary circumstances that they do not discuss, and their relationship develops by way of dishonesty and imposture with regard to a third party, which never appears to trouble them. Batra has his male character go on a gallant quest to seek out a defunct brand of cola somewhere in the city to give to his loved one because she adored drinking it as a child. Yet we never see him give it to her, never see her drinking it, never see her eyes lighting up at the memory or lighting up at the thought of what this man has done – nothing like that.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/31UT4tm