Saturday, March 23, 2013

Sona Spa Movie Update Review

Makarand Deshpande is a noted theatre and film actor who has given many powerful performances in a lot of movies that have won him accolades. He has also ventured into the directorial arena and unfortunately this journey hasn’t been quite a success. His latest film ‘Sona Spa’ that stars the very talented Naseeruddin Shah along with actors Aahana Kumrah, Shruti Vyas and Pooja Pradhan. The movie releases today, let’s see how it fares…
Story:
The movie starts with Baba Dayanand (Naseeruddin Shah), who is the man behind the concept of Sona Spa, explaining the concept from outer space (quite literally). The interesting thing about Sona Spa is that it sells sleep at the cost of 2500 rupees an hour! This means that the sleep workers sleep on behalf of the client who can stay awake and complete their other chores in parallel. The catch here is that the sleep workers also have the access to the client’s dreams while sleeping for them. The Mumbai branch of Sona Spa is operated by Indu madam (Pooja Pradhan) where Rucha (Shruti Vyas) and Ritu (Ahana Kumrah) work as sleep workers with their own set of troubles with life. While Rucha is a rich brat dealing with her father’s insomnia, Ritu is a well-mannered girl who deals with her traumatized sister and a comatose father. Sona Spa also has a senior employee, Meenakshi (Nivedita Bhattacharya), who is a prostitute turned ‘sleep worker’.
The rest of the movie is about how the two young girls, ‘who btw only sleep for you and not with you (bummer)’, deal with their client’s dreams and at the same time their own problems in life.
Positive Points:
Director Makarand Deshpande has chosen a concept that goes well with today’s fragmented and stressed lives where all a sleep deprived person needs is a few hours of sound sleep. Naseeruddin Shah’s depiction as a baba is good. The two young talents Aahana Kumrah and Shruti Vyas have played their parts well while Nivedita shows off her talent as prostitute in a lucknowi attire and accent.
Negative Points:
We would like to start by asking Naseer Sir, about ‘what was he thinking’ when he signed up for this film? Throughout the film, the very talented actor is shown talking through a TV screen at the spa since he is leading a very comfortable life in Seattle where there are more sleep deprived people! Ahana and Shruti, the two very talented theatre artists, are absolutely wasted in the movie. To top it all, there Pooja Pradhan, who should probably go back to her previous profession of modeling as she was good at that atleast. Here she looks more like a hotel stewardess than an entrepreneur.
Makarand Deshpande has successfully helmed a tale that makes sense only in few parts. The other characters including the police officer, a rich man (with a weird disorder of killing his lovers in dream) and Indu’s mentally charged brother have overplayed their roles.
Technical aspects:
The only one song in the film ‘Neend Ka Bijness’ is played during the interval and does no good for the film. Makarand, as a director, fails to entice the viewers with a confusing script where some of the sequences are left half-way while some of them don’t make sense at all. The filmmaker selects an interesting topic but executes it in a bizarre way.
Cinematography by Rajeev Jain is just about OK thanks to his framing of the spa which is noteworthy. The background score by Shailendra Barve is decent. Editing by Biren Joyti Mohanty is one aspect that could have been totally worked upon.
Verdict:
On a whole, Sona Spa is one movie that despite dealing with a good concept and talented theater artistes, fails to be executed properly. This is one confused saga that can be easily missed without any regrets. However, if you are looking forward for a sound sleep, then do visit a screening of Sona Spa since that will definitely put you to sleep!

0 comments:

Post a Comment