Life Goes On (I) (2009) User Reviews

A relentless stream of stupefyingly simplistic pathos

[pathaniav · 1/10 · 13 March 2011]

I was lured into watching this movie by the presence of some of my favorite stars - Girish Karnad and Om Puri. I started regretting my decision within the first 20 minutes. The plot had potential - a grieving family struggles to cope with the sudden death of the mother who was the glue that held the family together. But the script was painfully puerile. It threw in every cliché in the book and then some. There was a Hindu-Muslim angle, a rebellious lesbian daughter, immigrant angst, a cross-cultural marriage on the rocks, and an utterly predictable revelation of infidelity that was thrown in to humanize the otherwise goddess-like persona of the deceased mother and wife. And each cliché was executed in deadly earnest without an iota of subtlety or irony. There were repeated and ponderous musings on life and death. The dead woman kept appearing bathed in radiant hues as she sang and played the sitar, or strolled through flower filled meadows. Until the very end when her transgression was revealed and just to make sure the audience was hammered over the head with the idea - a picture frame with her photo was smashed to pieces. Although I had written off the movie by the half hour mark, I still cringed physically when there was a romantic duet in a meadow to showcase the youthful Hindu-Muslim romance threatened by rigid tradition. No, it was not done in a campy over- the-top Bollywood style, instead it was despairingly wooden and earnest. Bloody awful.