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graveyard of DOOM index < | > Meenaxi is simply amazing. On one hand you could maybe dismiss it as being just a two-and-a-half-hour love song with only the most superficial of plots, but what love songs! What music! What dances! What colour! Who cares why they're in the desert dancing among a hundred wooden Rajasthani puppets? Do they need a reason when they look so fucking beautiful? Who cares why all of a sudden we're in a brothel with one of the minor characters and a guy we've never seen before? Shut up and listen to that music!
Meenaxi gets extra points for introducing me to my new Bollywood girlcrush, Tabu, who has the title role of the film. With her striking face, broad hips and strong shoulders, her voluptuous lips curled into a wry grin, and her magnetic deep brown eyes, she's so much more robust and real, so much more interesting than the porcelain-pretty Bollywood princesses you normally see on the screen. Be still my moviegoing heart. Pause. Take a breath. Enough with the gushing. Thing is, I'm exaggerating to make a point. There is an overarching story to this film, and it's a pretty cool one at that. Our hero is Nawab, a writer who's looking for his next story. He sees the bewitching Meenaxi at a qawwali ceremony and the next day she comes to visit him and asks him to write her into his next novel. He agrees, as long as she promises not to interfere with the direction of the story. She kind of agrees to his condition and Nawab begins to write. His first story has the fictional Meenaxi meet and slowly fall for a Jaisalamer Prince recently returned from Hyderabad. The story is intercut with scenes of Nawab and Meenaxi back-and-forthing about what's wrong with the story - the bad guy's too much like a bad guy from a film, the characters lack spice... Eventually Nawab abandons his first attempt (abandons probably isn't the right word - Meenaxi sets fire to his manuscript in a scene involving a fleet of a dozen bicycles cycling around her in dance formation) and has another go, this time casting Meenaxi as Maria, an aspiring actress from Prague, who meets a charming visitor from India, played by the same actor who played the Jaisalamer prince, and slowly begins to fall for him (again). Nawab also writes himself into this story so that he can check up on how Maria/Meenaxi is doing. The real Meenaxi isn't impressed by the new story, either - the play Maria is in is wanky artistic gobbledygook, the hero is a nerd - but by this stage Nawab has caught a fever and the real twist of the movie is revealed, throwing the audience into doubt as to which aspects of what they've seen have been real, and which have been dreams, or stories, or visions. So yeah, that's kind of enough of it without giving too much away. You really have to go and see this film. From the gorgeous colours of the Jaisalamer desert to the theatrical stage-settings of Prague, every dance sequence is mesmerising, every scene is composed with grace and beauty, every song is... Sorry. Didn't take me long to get gushing again. I think I'm probably going to have to give this one four and a half ganesha out of five. Related links: Planet
Bollywood - Meenaxi (music review) |
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