Helicopter Eela, Director Pradeep Sarkar’s pitch-perfect story of a clingy mother and her son is the stuff great indie-cinema is made of.
Sarkar’s powerful directorial hand guides the film’s characters — Eela (Kajol), a single mother who once aspired to be a playback singer and her son Viv (Riddhi Sen) — through a difficult-to-frame narrative.
Eela starts way back in the late ’90s, a few months before MTV India is set to debut. Her boyfriend Arun (Eela, Arun — got the pun?), the supporting good-guy type played by Tota Roy Chowdhury, uses his connections in the music industry to get Eela a gig, singing a remix of Ruk Ruk Ruk from the movie Vijaypath. The song rockets her into an overnight sensation.
Like this particular rendition of the song (remade by composer Raghav Sachar, sung by Palomi Ghosh), the world Eela inhabits has a quirky nostalgic spin from the norm (especially in its depiction of Bollywood). The screenplay is so effortless and perceptive that the plot simply slips from one story-arc to the next without one noticing.
Other than Sarkar (whose filmography is made up of Parineeta, Laaga Chunri Mein Daag, Lafangay Parinday and Mardaani), there is something familiar and arresting about Kajol’s perky, plucky, worry-prone persona. Sometimes one feels that the actress is just play-acting herself (produced by Ajay Devgan, this is a family production after all).
In Sarkar’s able hands, and his penchant for designing strong, appealing female-centric films, Kajol gives one of her sincerest performance right till the slightly groan-inducing finale at a talent show (what is with Bollywood and talent shows?).
Until that bombastic cliché, everything is blemish-free.
FryDay