Powerful, brief & to the point

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Powerful, brief & to the point

Sunday, 23 September 2018 | Meenakshi Rao

Powerful, brief & to the point

Manto

*ing: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Rasika Dugal, Rajshri Deshpande, Rishi Kapoor, Paresh Rawal, Javed Akhtar

Rated: 8/10

The power of Manto, as a writer, personality and self-destruct mode carries the power of an atomic bomb and most of it gets translated into this sepia shaded movie by Nandita Das.

The power of this film and its subject Saadat Hasan Manto lies in the gentle unfolding of the life and times of the writer whose cutting-edge pen was the toast of most Bollywood scripts at one time.

He loved Mumbai as much as he loved himself and yet decided to quit everything dear to him, including the graves of his parents and son, to leave for Lahore because he was “itna toh musalmaan hoon ki maar diya jaoon.” Those were violent and divisive Partition days and Nandita does well to bring up one of the major faultlines in Manto’s personality by telling us of his inherent fear of things.

He loved with passion, had immense anger issues over intangibles like the state of society and lived life as a smouldering ember in a time and place where almost everything and anyone was somehow struggling to survive the first wave of independence.

Manto, being the volatile writer who saw the wrongs, especially on women, much more than others, made brevity as much his virtue as revelling in the painful times his vice.

A film on a personality like Manto is bound to be powerful unless the director gets it entirely wrong. The power of Das’ Manto lies in the fact that it interestingly captures all the nuances of the times and the people in a gentle unfolding of explosive events in the life of its main protagonist. The ambience and the atmosphere of those smoky times when intellectuals like Ismat Chughtai and Manto intermingled with the glamorous world of cinema and powered scripts with their literature, thoughts and philosophy over liberal round tables splashed with whiskey and cigarettes, are aptly captured on camera.

The dialogues, pithy and cutting, get to you with one-liners that unfold an entire life and time in a stunning frugality of words. Das compels you to question why Manto would self-destruct in such a manner. Brilliantly, she tells you that the only reason why such a brilliant short story writer with immense power of thought could die at 42 was his belief that he had the artistic licence to do so.

The other high point of the film is the stunning way in which Das inserts the dramatisations of Manto’s most loved stories Thanda Gosht, Khol Do and Toba Tek Singh, never once deviating from Manto’s unfolding life story. Cameos by Rishi Kapoor, Javed Akhtar, Vinod Nagpal, Divya Dutta, Ranvir Shourie are impactful and rounded.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui loses himself completely in Manto and proves his versatility and brilliance as an actor yet again.

Manto was a meteoric writer who died a meteor’s death — a fire of brilliance burning out brightly in the literary sky, often questioned and defiled for speaking the ugly truth of people and society with no punches spared. He was the badshah of brevity — both in writing and death, 42 being no age to die as an alcoholic who desperately wanted to live without alcohol but the realisation came too late in life and too close to death.

A rare movie on a rarest of rare writer!

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