Flavors – movie review.

I hadn’t seen any good movies in the last 4 months and the ones I saw, Barah Aana and Firaaq, weren’t good enough to merit a review.

Barah Aana was a clean attempt and inspite of some great acting by Vijay Raaz, the story suffered from being one-dimensional and treatment suffered from slow pace. Firaaq, I still have no clue why it is getting rave reviews and winning awards. Maybe I missed something. But from the things I understood, it was a pointless and slow movie with unrelated, unlinked (which is fine to some extent) and stories without a logical closure.  Of course, being slow doesn’t make a movie bad, but being slow with no food for thought does affect the movie’s chances.

Thankfully, things have changed for me with Flavors. Well, it was released in 2003, but I just caught it. 

If you haven’t seen it, you could as well skip the review and watch it here.

We have seen loads of crossover movies, a trend started by American Desi and continued by Indian Fish in American Waters, Outsourced and The Other End of the Line amongst others. Each of the movies were characterized by caricatures, something that Flavors stays clear of. Arguably its winning point is that most characters are kept quite real, from the just-married housewife to the visiting Indian parents to the guys on bench.

But for Anjan Srivastava and Bharti Achrekar, the actors are relatively unknown, but do very well in their well-defined roles. There are more than just a few moments where you laugh aloud. Inspite of its low production values, it has a very well-written script, crisp editing, apt music (by Mahesh Shankar and Leslie Lewis) and good storytelling from the director duo. The manner in which the stories are linked make you watch it again. So it has a good repeat value too.

I have already seen it a few times and this movie is on its way to replace American Desi in my list of favourites. Surely not worth missing.