REVIEW: One Room Kitchen

AN OLD-FASHIONED MIDDLE CLASS STORY

Back in the 1970s, filmmakers like Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Chatterjee and a bunch of their lesser clones made films about the aspirations, complexes and problems of the great Indian middle class. Many of these films were set in Bombay's chawls, housing societies, clerical departments of offices, buses and trains. Think Amol Palekar-Vidya Sinha, or Farooque Sheikh-Deepti Naval. Now, over three decades later, Bombay cinema has shifted its gaze to foreign lands, the chawls have disappeared and the middle class is hanging in an indeterminate space too fuzzy for filmmakers to grasp. 

Interestingly though, what happened in Bombay a generation ago, seems to have filtered down to smaller cities like Pune, now going through their own rush of economic prosperity, burgeoning population and a real estate boom. Mahesh Tilekar's Marathi film One Room Kitchen tries to make sense of this transition from being a sleepy middle-class town to an individualistic consumer society. The idea is promising, its exposition not quite as insightful and rewarding as it could have been.