Director: Sanjivan Lal
Cast: Sohail Lakhani, Delzad Hiravali, Apoorva Arora , Suraj Singh, Sachin Khedekar, Tanvi Azmi
With children as the principal cast, the hardest thing is to get the tone right. Bollywood veers usually, and distressingly, between cautionary or cutesy, and is only now learning to tread a new path. `Bubble Gum’ gets it to the rights, with its life-like portrayal of a couple of small-town teenage brothers experiencing the first stirrings of young adulthood.
There are several nice things about the film. The let-the kids-be-kids tenet is adhered to strictly : adults come in only when they need to. Vedant ( Lakhani) is an excitable fourteen-year-old, who is dealing, not very well, with the twin pressures of having a challenged older brother Vidur ( Hiravali), and the aches-and-pains first love brings. Jenny ( Arora) is the girl-next-door, and Vedant is well and truly smitten, but he’s not the only contender. Bad boy Ratan ( Singh) is a worthy rival, keeping a lusty eye on both Ved’s girl and Vidur’s stamp collection, as the gang looks on.
To have urban kids hanging out in middle-class colony compounds minus gizmos is a near impossibility these days. But this film is set in the prehistoric pre-internet, pre-cellphone '80s when acquiring a shiny new bicycle held out the same happiness as an X Box can today. The location is Jamshedpur ( the second time it’s featured big in the last couple of years, after ‘Udaan’), so you get a mélange of accents ( Bihari, Bengali, and in between), not overdone, hurray. The characters look as if they belong to those houses, and live that life. In which everyone in town knows everyone else, the fathers of pretty girls have to be prostrated before, summer afternoons have to spent playing `kabaddi’ ( the only way you can legitimately hold a girl’s hand), and festivals are a merry, communal affair : the director clearly knows his ground, and serves nostalgia well-done, without mawkishness.
Cast: Sohail Lakhani, Delzad Hiravali, Apoorva Arora , Suraj Singh, Sachin Khedekar, Tanvi Azmi
With children as the principal cast, the hardest thing is to get the tone right. Bollywood veers usually, and distressingly, between cautionary or cutesy, and is only now learning to tread a new path. `Bubble Gum’ gets it to the rights, with its life-like portrayal of a couple of small-town teenage brothers experiencing the first stirrings of young adulthood.
There are several nice things about the film. The let-the kids-be-kids tenet is adhered to strictly : adults come in only when they need to. Vedant ( Lakhani) is an excitable fourteen-year-old, who is dealing, not very well, with the twin pressures of having a challenged older brother Vidur ( Hiravali), and the aches-and-pains first love brings. Jenny ( Arora) is the girl-next-door, and Vedant is well and truly smitten, but he’s not the only contender. Bad boy Ratan ( Singh) is a worthy rival, keeping a lusty eye on both Ved’s girl and Vidur’s stamp collection, as the gang looks on.
To have urban kids hanging out in middle-class colony compounds minus gizmos is a near impossibility these days. But this film is set in the prehistoric pre-internet, pre-cellphone '80s when acquiring a shiny new bicycle held out the same happiness as an X Box can today. The location is Jamshedpur ( the second time it’s featured big in the last couple of years, after ‘Udaan’), so you get a mélange of accents ( Bihari, Bengali, and in between), not overdone, hurray. The characters look as if they belong to those houses, and live that life. In which everyone in town knows everyone else, the fathers of pretty girls have to be prostrated before, summer afternoons have to spent playing `kabaddi’ ( the only way you can legitimately hold a girl’s hand), and festivals are a merry, communal affair : the director clearly knows his ground, and serves nostalgia well-done, without mawkishness.
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