Dissonant Themes

Morning Raga is an Indian-English movie starring Prakash Rao, son of K. Raghavendra Rao – maker of numerous commercial masalas in Telugu. It boasts a cast that'll make the art movie circles get their collective undergarments into delectable bunches – Shabana Azmi, Perizaad Zorabian, Nasser , the works. It also happens to be a pretty boring movie, which probably enhances its appeal as an art film.

It is a pseudo-psychodrama, something about the irreparable psychological scars that Shabana Azmi suffers after an accident that kills her young son and her best friend. The best friend's son grows up into a musician, and uses his music to get hitched to a ravishing looking Perizaad Zorabian and also remove the scars from Azmi's wounded psyche. Though the setting is coastal Andhra Pradesh, everyone speaks in English. Even Thalaivaasal Vijay. But this post is not a review per se. It is an excuse for me to put up a picture of the ravishing Zorabian.

It is also a wishlist of sorts.

Will someone please tell Mani Sharma that rendering “Thaaye Yasodha” with a drum pad in the background is not fusion. Nor is having one female voice scream operatically while another sings a Keerthana. If you are going to tell him that, you might as well add that his music in the movie pretty much sucked. You are also free to generalize and tell him that his music mostly sucks.

Harris Jayaraj talks to Sujatha in the latest issue of Anandha Vikatan (paid subscription required), and tells him he hates this type of “fusion”.

“The music that passes for fusion these days – a tabla, a dholak, a veena, a drum pad and a keyboard all sounding off against each other – I hate it. It is a difficult task to blend traditional Indian instruments and modern cinema.”

While one of you is talking to Mani Sharma, will someone else please take the thesaurus out of Subhash K Jha's hands. Here is his review of Morning Raaga. Please tell me what the heck this means:

Tamil actor Nasser as Abhinay's estranged feudal father is portrayed rather uni-dimensionally. Did he have to be a boor to offset the sonorous sensitivity that suffuses the soul of this genteel work of art?