Mee Raqsam Film Evaluation: Baba Azmi’s Movie Will Dance Its Means Into Your Coronary heart

Solid: Aditi Subedi, Naseeruddin Shah, Danish Hussain, Sudeepta Singh, Rakesh Chaturvedi Om, Kaustubh Shukla, Juhaina Ahsan and Shivangi Gautam

Director: Baba Azmi

Score: four Stars (out of 5)

Cinematographer Baba Azmi’s debut as a producer and director, Mee Raqsam (I Dance) is a disarmingly easy, delicate, heart-warming movie that extra than simply tells a narrative. Couched in it’s a fervent and pressing advocacy of India’s tradition of concord and assimilation that’s underneath growing risk in a local weather polluted by hatred, bigotry and political skullduggery.

A compact plot, an exquisite forged and refreshingly unpretentious storytelling are harnessed for a selected objective. It’s devoted to the humanism of the late poet and lyricist Kaifi Azmi and filmed fully in his native village of Mijwan in Azamgarh district.

The movie, offered by Shabana Azmi, has Naseeruddin Shah in a particular look. He performs a guardian of morality who’s staunchly against the winds of change that problem his maintain over the neighborhood.

Mee Raqsam revolves round a Muslim schoolgirl Maryam (Aditi Subedi), who has to battle boundaries of sophistication, faith and gender as she pursues her ardour for Bharatanatyam dance. The lady receives unstinted assist and encouragement from her father Salim (Danish Hussain), a extremely expert tailor who struggles to make ends meet.

Salim faces a bruising backlash from his conservative village neighborhood, represented principally by the lady’s stubborn maternal aunt Zehra (Shraddha Kaul). However he would not budge an inch from his choice to again his daughter to the hilt even on the danger of being socially ostracised.

Maryam’s dance trainer Uma (Sudeepta Singh), too, is in peril of alienating her academy’s principal patron Jayprakash (Rakesh Chaturvedi Om), who appears askance at a Muslim lady study a classical dance type that, in substance and execution, adheres to strict, codified, religiously-sanctioned norms.

For Maryam, Bharatanatyam is an assertion of her freedom of selection in addition to her love for her late mom Sakina, a proficient dancer herself whose items remained hidden from the world. She falls in poor health within the movie’s prelude and passes away. The grieving daughter discovers within the classical dance type not only a means to take her thoughts away from her private loss however a supply of rejuvenation.

The soundscape offers Mee Raqsam its eclectic timbre. The strains of Carnatic music in a nondescript mohalla of Uttar Pradesh are intrinsically, and immediately, alluring and transformative. Add to the elegant high quality of the songs the intricacies of the mudras and steps of Bharatanatyam carried out by a gifted younger actress and you might be immediately transported to a spot that’s infused with positivity, the place a way of insurrection, liberation and affirmation is immediately evoked and bolstered.

Faith is not the one situation that the spirited Maryam has to reckon with. Her gender will get in the best way simply as a lot as her identify does. Her acerbic aunt (who runs a stitching and embroidery coaching centre for ladies) asks Salim if he intends his daughter to be a tawaif. Maryam’s grandmother (Farrukh Jafar), too, raises her voice to endorse Zehra’s orthodoxy.

Group elder Hashim Seth (Naseeruddin Shah) provides his bit to cauldron by mentioning to Maryam’s father that Bharatanatyam originated in Hindu temples and it not solely promotes idolatry, however can also be linked to the Devadasi custom.

The hostility doesn’t cease with the branding of Bharatanatyam as gair mazhabi and the direct warnings from the village maulana. It assumes excessive proportions. Neither is the naysaying restricted to Salim’s co-religionists. Jayprakash can not see past the curiosity worth of a Muslim lady studying Bharatanatyam.

Salim stands agency however Maryam, pushed to the wall, almost offers up the combat. However the father-daughter duo is not left fully to their very own gadgets. The dance college patron’s Sufi music-loving daughter (Shivangi Gautam) stands by Maryam. So does her older cousin (Juhaina Ahsan), who’s unable underneath social strain to reciprocate the sentiments that an autorickshaw driver (Kaustubh Shukla) has for her. All of the three kids develop into instrumental in a technique or one other in serving to Maryam’s trigger.

In a telling second, Jayprakash, when he learns that considered one of Uma’s most promising trainees is a Muslim lady, reprimands his personal daughter. He asks her: if a ‘Mohammedan’ lady can study an ‘Indian’ dance, why cannot you? Anjali’s response justifiably drips scorn: “Mohammedan Indian nahi hai kya?”

That’s exactly the query that Mee Raqsam seeks to reply. It doesn’t pull its punches. It doesn’t slip into defensive rancour or shrill rhetoric both. The script, written by Safdar Mir and Husain Mir, makes its level by means which can be rooted in up to date actuality even when the movie takes a detour or two into the realm of simplistic melodrama within the climactic sequences.

For a movie helmed by a cameraman – Baba Azmi delegates the position of director of images to Mohsin Khan Pathan – Mee Raqsam is refreshingly free from self-conscious visible thrives regardless of by no means failing to convey a vivid sense of place. The unobtrusive camerawork is consistent with the uncomplicated nature of the areas the place the motion is about and the directness of the message sought to be delivered by this story that transmits hope even because it strikes a cautionary word in regards to the risks that this various nation’s pluralistic beliefs face.

Mee Raqsam belongs to each Danish Hussain and Aditi Subedi, who play the 2 pivotal characters with empathy and subtlety, qualities which can be sustained all by the movie not simply by the 2 actors per se, but additionally by Baba Azmi’s genteel, dignified storytelling fashion.

The supporting forged is completely fabulous. As one of many faces of conservatism within the movie, Shraddha Kaul is not your common cantankerous aunt out to outshout everybody. The character, etched out in a nuanced style, makes her concern for Maryam and the household ‘honour’ really feel completely plausible with out having to resort to the same old snickering and sneering that comes with the territory. Credit score is due right here as a lot to the writing as to the efficiency.

Naseeruddin Shah, who has solely a handful of scenes within the position of the conservative cleric decided to make Salim pay for his transgressions, is coldness personified as he delivers his hateful edicts.

The opposite supporting actors, no matter the display screen time they individually have, aren’t swamped out of the image. Sudeepta Singh, Rakesh Chaturvedi Om, Kaustubh Shukla, Juhaina Ahsan and Shivangi Gautam are all allowed their moments, a few them appreciably greater than the remaining. Collectively, they provide it their greatest shot.

Watch Mee Raqsam as a result of it’s going to dance its manner into your coronary heart if it is in the correct place.