BARFI! Review

These days, Bollywood movies are trying too hard to be trashy parties, the kind where drugs are passed around and people are too high to engage in intelligible conversation. Some of these parties are quite fun, some of these aren't, but most of these are downright horrendous and leave you with a horrible hangover in the morning.
Barfi! isn't that kind of a party.

It's more of a get-together of old friends. A meeting where the people aren't too drunk or too sober, and everyone's in a delightful mood.


The film makes you laugh without being trashy, it makes you cry without being too melodramatic. It invokes memories of great films, past and present, such as the films of Chaplin and Jean Pierre Jeunet, but it never feels disrespectful. Barfi is more of a descendant of those great films rather than a downright rip-off.
There's little dialogue in the film, which allows the actors more space to breathe. There's a lot of expressing done with, well, expressions.
Ranbir Kapoor is the best at what he does, and he shines as Barfi. He channels the greatest silent performers of all time: there's a bit of Buster Keaton here, a dash of Chaplin there, a sprinkling of Rowan Atkinson and a generous helping of Raj Kapoor (who, by the way, was greatly influenced by Chaplin). What makes his performance so brilliant is that despite all these influences, Ranbir makes the character feel unique.

Ileana D'Cruz as Shruti, is also quite good. There are a lot of moments where she's faced with conflicting emotions, where she's utterly confused. And she plays those moments brilliantly. Her eyes do a lot of the talking, and it also helps that she's a pretty face.
Priyanka Chopra sheds all of that glamour a lot of us recognize her for, and delivers a pretty decent (although, at times, quite hammy) performance as Jhilmil, an autistic girl who is oft misunderstood and all but disowned by her family.
And then there are quite a few brilliant actors from the Bangla film industry. These guys are all familiar faces, and quite talented and they're unsurprisingly amazing in their role.
The film is mostly plotless and shines when we don't really have a plot to follow, but merely moments to cherish. Ironically, the film suffers when the plot kicks in. It starts dragging, slowing down, and the director's tiredness starts to show. The film never descends into full-blown melodrama but definitely touches those depths in the second half.

But it's not at all a perfect film. It's quite messy from a narrative standpoint. It goes through two flashbacks in the first ten minutes, then takes quite some time to introduce characters. Add to that the fact that there are about three people narrating Barfi's story at once.
From the very first shot, you know that you're in for a film that's visually magnificent. I doubt Darjeeling's looked this beautiful on celluloid before, and it's western geography lends to the film's distance from commercial Bolly fare. And Kolkata, ofcourse... How can you not make it look beautiful. I'm in Kolkata at the moment and it's a beautiful city. Even a Sajid Khan or a Rohit Shetty can't make her look ugly.
Pritam has been accused of being a plagiarist quite often, and I'm not going to disagree. I've heard a lot of this music elsewhere, but that doesn't change the fact that the music is great. It's got the same effect that the music of Up had on me.
I love how it director Anurag Basu tries to experiment with a few unconventional film techniques. During Silent film-like sequences, the framerate begins to stutter, as if the film's playing on 18 frames-per-second. He pushes in a few stop-motion sequences into the film as well. Sometimes they work, most times they don't, but they're always interesting to watch.

Barfi is best enjoyed as a collection of great moments, rather than great scenes. And there are great moments aplenty. But what is important is that Barfi comes together as a film. There's a strong glue in form of Ranbir Kapoor that binds each and every moment to form a great film, and that is quite a feat. This is the kind of film I'd like India to be recognized by, much like how Jean Pierre Jeunet's films spell F-R-A-N-C-E for us film buffs. A definite must watch.

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