Aanch Review

Indian movies are formula based. 100% of that statement is true 90% of the time. "What loony statistics are those?" Okay, so maybe these aren't Nobel Prize stats, but remember that we're talking about our moviemakers here, so it's close enough. Besides, they don't care. Do you care? I don't care!

As I was saying, Anch is a part of the 10% of the movies that don't follow a formula. They follow the Chaos Theory - need not blame the screw-up only on the formula, can also blame it on the freak nature of beings. Or, as in this case, the freak beings of nature. Or being freaks of nature. Or being nature of freaks. Or...128, 129, 130. Alright! Word count met, so time to move on.

When the first shot came onto the screen, people all around me thought it was the annoying newsreel about social misfits and untouchables. Fools, should've asked me. It was a newsreel about creepy human faces and how to sympathize. Ten insightful minutes later, I was shocked to see a Paresh Rawal look-alike in the weird-faces documentary. Some nerve, the documentary had. Rising in protest I looked at the people around me: some sleeping, some surprised, but most weeping. As I looked closely, it struck me that all this was the movie itself. Oh well, might as well follow it from here.

So the bunch of weird faces... er, new faces was the hero and his buddies. He's explaining to his city pals, the atrocities of his village. The gruesome killings, the beheadings and the bloodshed. Instead of packing their booty, they want to tag along to the serenity of his peaceful village. Good - the way these guys acted, I wished they got shot on the train itself. But they reach the village, and then of course come Paresh Rawal and Nana Patekar.

Paresh Rawal is the ringleader of the hooligans in one village, and Nana Patekar is the boss of the louts in another. The two villages and the people hate each other's guts. Our hero is forced to marry a girl from the enemy's village. When they despise each other's community, why would they arrange marriage with a girl from the enemy village? To make a movie out of it, sonny.

Consequentially, a gore-fest follows, with people from the two villages drawing blood for blood and eye for eye - all for blind self-esteem and pride. Ultimately killing the chiefs and half the villagers in the process.

This is based on a true life, shocking incident. The treatment and the disjointed scenes are all very real. But what baffles all is the presence of seasoned campaigners like Nana and Paresh in a B-grade movie like this one. Let's just hope that it's poor judgment and not lack of offers. In spite of this, both of them have given tremendous performances. Nana has even lent his voice for one of the songs. That's what killed all those villagers, I think. About Paresh, he's just his usual self - great.

The only part of the movie when everyone was awake was the two raunchy, downright vulgar numbers. Yuck! To sum it up in a line, two vengeful villages, one wedding and one hell of a busy undertaker. In a word, painful. In an alphabet, Z.