REVIEW: Bumm Bumm Bole

NO CHILD'S PLAY

I haven't watched Majid Majidi's Children of Heaven (1997) on which Priyadarshan's Bumm Bumm Bole is based, and plan to remedy that right away. Having seen his other critically acclaimed work Color of Paradise, it's hard to believe that Majidi's original could've been anything like the remake. Imagine a children's film opening with a gruesome bomb blast that straightaway warrants a U/A certification. For me the exercise in watching this film was to try and identify the portions faithfully copied from the original, and elements forcibly inserted by the Indian director.

The plotline is simple. Pinu (Darsheel Safary) loses his little sister Rimjhim's (Ziya Vastani) torn sandals when he's running errands. His impoverished family cannot afford a new pair and hence the brother-sister duo decides not to report the loss to their parents and make do with just one pair of weather-worn shoes (Pinu's) for the time being. The most engaging parts of the film are the exchanges between the two children, as they write notes to each other trying to figure a way out of this problem, struggle to preserve the precious pair that they now share and run to and from school to make it in time to exchange footwear (Rimjhim goes to morning school, while Pinu has afternoon lessons). These scenes seem faithfully reproduced from the original, albeit with unnecessary background music.

A couple of other snippets stand out of an otherwise lacklustre endeavour. Rimjhim follows the rag picker's daughter (her father's the one who has accidentally picked up the shoes from outside the grocer's shop) home when she finds her wearing her missing red shoes. But once brother and sister understand that the rag picker's family is even poorer than theirs, they abandon the search. Later, the out-of-luck father goes around to the affluent town nearby knocking at the doors of well-appointed bungalows looking for a gardener's job, and Pinu lends a helping hand with his easy charm.

But the track involving the parents' (Atul Kulkarni and Rituparna Sengupta) travails and terrorist activities in the village (supposedly in the North-East, but shot in Ooty and given away by a newspaper from Coimbatore), are totally senseless. The intermittent violence (both in terms of actual brutality and unsavoury dialogue) is a serious put-off and the blatant product endorsements an eye-sore. Even in the end, when the poor father does have some money to buy new footwear for his kids, he heads straight to the Adidas store! Why? Because that's where the producers got their branding fees from.

Priyadarshan's treatment is so heavy-handed it takes the charm out of this simple fable about the innocence of childhood. He lacks the capacity to look at the world through a child's eyes -- a hallmark of all good Iranian films woven around children.

Darsheel Safary who stole the show in Taare Zameen Par a couple of years ago, is competent, but cannot really salvage the film. Sadly, while you walk in to Bumm Bumm Bole with your kids hoping to show them a slice-of-life film inspired by the Iranian tradition of humanist cinema, your kids walk out with the scary verdict, "Housefull was much better than this."

Comments

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