My first movie review!

A follow up to such a path breaking and impact creating movie as Lagaan comes with all the associated hype and baggage making it almost impossible not to disappoint. Swades does not surprise in this regard.

Swades is the story of Mohan Bhargava (Shah Rukh Khan), a successful young NRI working at NASA. Amidst the trappings of success he yearns for the mother figure in his life, his nanny Kaveriamma (Kishori Ballal). He also has feelings of guilt for having kept her at an old age home. Overwhelmed by all of this he decided to go to India and bring her back, thereby completing his life.

His journey takes him to a little village in Uttar Pradesh, where he meets her and his childhood friend Gita (Gayatri Joshi). Gita lives with Kaveriamma and runs the local school in this village beset with poverty, infrastructure problems, child labour and the like. What begins as a couple of harmless quests in order to convince Kaveriamma to go back with him slowly turns into a mission of making the village (and in the process,India) a better place. Inspiration for him is never at a shortage in the form of the beautiful, strong willed and independent Gita who has no plans but to stay there and make it a better place anyway. Needless to say the two of them are inevitably drawn towards each other. Mohan is soon torn between his life back in the USA and his new found “make India a better place” purpose in life ,of which Gita is an integral part of. How he handles this conflict forms the rest of the film.

What could have been told in two hours is dragged on to three hours plus and this to me is the single biggest drawback in the film. Large dollops of moral instruction and preachiness are generously dished out to the unsuspecting public. Sure, with a theme like this some amount of the above is to be expected but then it goes way overboard here. Subtlety in driving home the point is definitely not one of the things Swades has going for it. Some of the song sequences seem to pop in from nowhere and none of them ever seem to end. The characters in the film are all good. There are no shades of black or even grey, which takes away from the realism. I would think that a young tyke trying to bring about change and upheaval in a traditionalist and rigid surrounding would meet with a great deal of resistance and difficulty while trying to feed the people his ideas. For Mohan it all seems to come too easily. The people seem to be most happy to listen to whatever he says and resistance if any is minimal.

Now for the good points. The performances are very good across the board ( except for the American actors, who all seem wooden in appearance and manner). Shah Rukh Khan and Gayathri Joshi look great together and carry out their roles with élan. The romance between the two is handled very well and this makes for a lot of very enjoyable sequences. This can also be said of some of the other sequences involving the village folk. ARRahmans music is good without being spectacular. The songs seem a trifle too long though. Needless to say, the movie comes with an important message and it is for this single reason that Ashuthosh Govarikar needs to be complemented and admired. To cut a long story short, I would give Swades three stars out of five. Definitely not a must-watch but then not a total washout either.