just jhaag

written just after sitting through an episode of यहाँ मैं घर घर खेली and पवित्र रिश्ता

• Alok Nath is alive and kicking! Good grief! The man was around rinsing emotions when we got our first television set; ThespiaNath seems to have perfected a new "bhaarii" tone and now wanders about with a thevar moustache, a brooding drooping anti-smile and a set of facial expressions that make you think he's trying to recover from having consumed a dose of laxative that is well past its expiry date
(Of course it took me a while to see the most obvious reason he showed up in this show -- it's a Rajshri production; duh!)

• The script (a grandiose word for this enterprise) and dialogues were written in bullet time and filmed at 100 FPS; nothing else can account to about 15 minutes spent on close-ups, shots featuring a camera trying to adjust its focus and preposterous wide-eyed reaction shots


• The paucity of useful material is quite evident when the most significant thing that happens in 20 minutes (surrounded by zooms in, cuts to XCUs featuring gnashing teeth, appearances of faces in slow motion) is a slap. It's not a simple, effective slap. It's a completely fake exercise in sleight of hand


• These soaps owe a lot to theatre: how else can you explain the expressionist faces that support voiceovers?


• The only lighting scheme employed is what we used to refer to in college theatre as "doing it with generals" -- this means that all you do is turn on every light you have, ignoring the difference between spots and foot lights and you end up with everyone looking like a fresh candle with nary a shadow around; there's no sense of mise en scène; clearly no one looked at something like The X Files to understand how useful lighting can be


• Although it's clear that it's a work of fiction, soaps like this make an even stronger assertion: it's impossible for anyone to behave like this in real life.