Naina is the story of a girl living in London who lost her eyesight and her parents when still very young. As a young woman now she is offered a chance to see again through a cornea transplant. After the operation she discovers that she can see a lot more than she is supposed to. She sees dead people and those who are going to die. When she discovers that the image she sees in the mirror is not hers she decides to find a reason to it all. That takes her to Gujrat from where her cornea had been flown in. she finds out that her eyesight had come from a girl who could foresee other people’s deaths and was branded a witch by the villagers. Cursed and abused by her mother in a moment of anguish she committed suicide. Only by laying her soul to rest can Naina find peace. Despite doing that she retains her ability to foresee death and tries to save hundreds of people in a London tube accident where she too loses her eyesight. At the end she is happy for though she has lost her sight she has also lost the visions of death. Does the story remind you of some other film? Sixth Sense? That’s one of the greatest problems with Naina; so much of it has been taken from elsewhere. The posters remind you of The Ring, the story and many scenes remind you of The Sixth Sense, another episode is taken from Dark Waters, and so on.
The story is weak and is sometimes spread so thin that the dialogues go ridiculous. The first half is episodic and tells you little, just so many incidents of Naina seeing ghosts in every nook and corner of the city, though funny in a way because these ghosts look familiar, like visitors from other famous horror flicks. The second half has some interesting scenes of Naina’s counterpart Khemi in the rural Gujrat. Here too, the cultural difference between the two girls, Naina and Khemi, and the resulting potential for complexity is not utilized by the director. On the whole the film looks like the director was hoping to stretch a two line story idea into a two hour film with some spooky ghost scenes as fillers.
On the acting front, it seems difficult to decide who is worse, Anuj Sawhney, the Doctor or Kamini Khanna, the Grandmother, who single-handedly reduces the film to a B-grade television drama? Urmila Matondkar is only marginally better, what with her continuous jaw-dropping. Despite all these weaknesses the film is worth seeing once, if only to shame our cinematographers and visual effects supervisors. The visual effects are so clean, the editing so silent, it makes other Bollywood films look like belonging to the stone age. The entire technical crew is non-Indian. I would hate to think that is the reason for the high technical standards. And yes, Naina mercifully, has no songs.
written on 20 May 2005
The story is weak and is sometimes spread so thin that the dialogues go ridiculous. The first half is episodic and tells you little, just so many incidents of Naina seeing ghosts in every nook and corner of the city, though funny in a way because these ghosts look familiar, like visitors from other famous horror flicks. The second half has some interesting scenes of Naina’s counterpart Khemi in the rural Gujrat. Here too, the cultural difference between the two girls, Naina and Khemi, and the resulting potential for complexity is not utilized by the director. On the whole the film looks like the director was hoping to stretch a two line story idea into a two hour film with some spooky ghost scenes as fillers.
On the acting front, it seems difficult to decide who is worse, Anuj Sawhney, the Doctor or Kamini Khanna, the Grandmother, who single-handedly reduces the film to a B-grade television drama? Urmila Matondkar is only marginally better, what with her continuous jaw-dropping. Despite all these weaknesses the film is worth seeing once, if only to shame our cinematographers and visual effects supervisors. The visual effects are so clean, the editing so silent, it makes other Bollywood films look like belonging to the stone age. The entire technical crew is non-Indian. I would hate to think that is the reason for the high technical standards. And yes, Naina mercifully, has no songs.
written on 20 May 2005
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