Movie Review | 8 AM Metro: A ride of honest emotions worth taking
The task of making a sensitive film like 8 AM Metro is never easy. It also brings with it the challenges of the multiplex. Today, there is a stream and a space. What ails the stream is its inbuilt hesitation. It fails to declare. It hesitatingly smuggles itself into the theatre. Good films like Bheed are lost in the din and dust of big not better cinema.
Creative filmmakers will now have to be market savvy too.
The challenge is likely to be professionally critical, like when the outgoing boss of Preetam (Gulshan Devaiah) tells him that there is help around the corner for those who are socially awkward, shy, and even apologetic. Resultantly, they may miss a lifetime or two.
There is tremendous pressure in our society — to state the obvious. Pressure at work — targets and monthly competition and new mirage standards. Also, fragile relationships, and social media influence. Increased solitariness let a crowded world!! Times, when we reached out to our kith and kin, are now a paradigm of the past. Partly because our kith are wrapped in their own challenges, and we get judgments in place of empathy.
There is an increasing need to open up like Ira (Saiyami Kher). Preetam and Ira, and their baggage, meet up on a Metro train day after day, first by accident, then by pretence, later by design and soon, by desire.
Both Preetam and Ira are independently married. By inference: emotionally constricted and physically restrained. Umesh (Umesh Kamat) and Mridula (Kalpika Ganesh) are in the backspace as the spouse but central to the emotive space of the protagonist and there is the tale of the twosome rendezvous on the 8 AM Metro.
Gulzar Saab wrote the beautiful thought many decades ago when he said: “Pyar ko pyar he rehne do, koi naam na do (let love be love, don’t give it a name)”. He also cautions – “Haath se chuke ise ilzam na do (don’t touch it by hand, don’t accuse it of relationships)”.
When did these poignant lines become a tale to tell? Inspired by a work of Malladi Krishna Murthy Andamaina Jeevitam, Raj Rachakonda thematically borrows the Gulzar verse and weaves a simple linear story.
Ira hesitatingly travels by train from Nanded to Hyderabad to take care of her sister Riya (Nimisha Nayar). She suffers from a form of tachophobia (fear of speeding). Forced to take the local Metro train, she suffers a panic attack, only to be helped by a stranger, Preetam. The two start meeting regularly, every day. She is on the way to meet her sister at the nursing home, and he is on his way to his job. Both hail from different backgrounds, with she being a middle-class lady with two kids and her husband Umesh.
Preetam is married to his loving wife, Mridula, with two kids. The twosome finds solace in each other’s company. The subtlety of the narrative eschews any suggestive physicality. If one has missed it, it gets to be stated at a later point in time when through her published work, Ira questions why there cannot be a platonic relationship of complete honesty between a man and a woman.
Today, maybe it is even more complex and suspect if it is within two of the same sex. Is matrimony the insurance office of all emotions? Is it the pawn agents’ office?
As Ira and Preetam draw closer to each other, we notice cracks in Ria’s relationship with her husband. Given the primordial proprietorial guarantees in marriage, we are unwilling to give error a chance of redemption.
However, the crux of the relationship between Ira and Preetam is platonic, without reference but with reverence to Uttam and Mridula. Given their independent stance, would they be welcome to and understanding of the Ira-Preetam friendship? When do they come to know of it?
A noteworthy aspect of the film is how shorn of melodrama the script and dialogues (Assad Hussain and Raj R) take you to a meaningful climax. A thought-provoking one too. Be it in the manner in which the viewer is informed of Ira taking Umesh into confidence or how Preetam has a pet, there is a style of a rare quotient in the film.
This is not to say this is a perfect film. It is an honest film. The emotive picnic of the protagonist in the timeline of growing shadows of needless guilt will place 8 AM Metro as a celebration of relationships – particularly untouched by romance or physical attractions between the prime players. I can only think of Silsila and the relationship between Jaya and Sanjeev in the film where two persons of opposite sexes are friends.
Gulshan Devaiah as Preetam is flawless and commendable. Saiyami is good but her dialogue delivery does not stand up to the texture of Gulzar’s poetry. While the lead pair are honest, I leave with a lurking thought that maybe, just maybe, with a better cast, Raj would well have had a winner on hand.
Raj’s long epilogue takes us through the famous Kafka story of the little girl who lost her toy and how in the journey of love what is not permanent will come back in a different form.
Watch the film for a fresh stance, and the brilliance of Gulzar.
Lend your ears a little to the signature poetry of Gulzar Saab. The seamless movement of the poetry from the pen of Ira, nay Gulzar, is in itself a narrative built with what is best described by Preetam with accuracy as emotional, raw and pure.
Raj R. gives you raw and a substantially pure film. It is a song on the ear, faltering in execution. However, one must hasten to add that it is in line with some emerging good films like Bheed and Afwah.
This Metro liner is not swanky and speedy but if you care to look out of the window, you are sure to get a sub-aerial view of life, not to mention sometimes some folded corners, some creased areas, some deep traumas some hurt memories and some mirrored values.
Take this Metro ride.
