Masala can be a beautiful thing, if the story at the heart of your
movie is strong enough to support a range of clashing genres, and if
you’re willing to fully embrace each genre as it comes along. Without a
strong story, you end up with an incoherent mess. Without committing
to each genre, you wind up with Alag: He Is Different . . . He Is Alone (2006).
The film opens with Doctor Richard Dyer (veteran Bollywood White Guy Tom Alter), a brilliant but corrupt scientist, declaring that he needs a human mind to experiment on. Over the past fifteen tears, he’s learned everything he can by experimenting on animals; given a human mind, he should be able to unlock the secrets of human intelligence, cure Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, and if not rule the world, at least become very rich and powerful. Dyer dispatches his trusty henchman to bring him a test subject, then disappears completely from the movie for the next hour.
Meanwhile, solitary widower Hemant Rastogi (Yatin Karyekar) has died. While investigating, the lead inspector (Sharat Saxena, in one of his rare non-evil roles) discovers that Hemant wasn’t quite as solitary as everyone though; he has a son, Tejas (Akshay Kapoor) who has been hidden in the basement for the past eighteen years.
Tejas is . . . strange. He’s completely hairless, extremely sensitive to light, and just as shy and frightened as you’d expect from a man whose only human contact since he was a small child was his own father. He’s also extremely well read, having had nothing else to do for the last eighteen years, and he claims he can remember every word on every page of every book he’s ever read. The inspector consults with Purva Rana (Divya Mirza), and the two decide that the best possible way to help this sheltered young man to return to human society would be to send him to the home for troubled youth run by her father, Pushkar Rana (Jayant Kripalini).
(I’m really not sure just what this home for troubled youth is supposed to be, honestly. The inmates attend classes and wear what look like school uniforms, but Tejas is explicitly in his early twenties, the other students appear to be the same age, and no one comments on any age difference. It appears to be, for want of another term, a sort of ‘Reform College.’)
After a long drive, during which Tejas gets to demonstrate his butterfly whispering skills, Purva gives him a uniform and contact lenses which magically cure his light sensitivity, then she takes him to the lunchroom, introduces him to the other students, and then leaves. It doesn’t go well. The local bully immediately tries to force Tejas to wear a spoon on his nose. Tejas responds by rubbing the spoon, which magnetically draws all the other spoons in the room into a spoon tower, which looks like . . .
The bullies keep tormenting Tejas (because taunting the quiet, repressed guy with supernatural powers is always a good idea!) while the staff treat him with either indifference or active hostility. He’s a fragile, special soul, too good for this world, and Tejas keeps suffering nobly, while demonstrating the odd amazing power, and then, suddenly, things get better. And that’s when the mad scientist returns.
Alag is a prime example of a movie that doesn’t know what it wants to say. Tejas is set up to be a Messianic figure, but he really doesn’t bring any message more profound than “Don’t shoot pigeons for fun” and “Please stop hitting me.” The film may be trying to make a statement about how society isolates and torments people who don’t fit in, but that is already obvious to anyone who attended middle school.
And then there’s Doctor Dyer. Most of the movie has a reasonably naturalistic, if solemn and self-important style, but all the scenes involving Doctor Dyer are completely over the top. While Tejas is not a superhero, Dyer is a gleeful supervillain. While the Dyer scenes are fun, though, they have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the movie; it’s like Mogambo showing up at the end of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai to steal little Anjali’s lunch money.
And as tacked on as the villain is, he’s still more integrated into the movie than the romance plotline. Naturally Tejas falls in love with Purva, since she’s the only woman he knows, and the only person who treats him with any sort of respect or decency. But the grand and completely inappropriate romance is confined to two songs and one line of dialogue, and seems to have been included just to add an extra note of tragedy to the end of the movie, just in time for a crowd of major Bollywood celebrities to sing over the credits about how special and alone Tejas is. It’s not so much emotional manipulation as shouting to the audience, “You there! Be sad! Right now!”
The film opens with Doctor Richard Dyer (veteran Bollywood White Guy Tom Alter), a brilliant but corrupt scientist, declaring that he needs a human mind to experiment on. Over the past fifteen tears, he’s learned everything he can by experimenting on animals; given a human mind, he should be able to unlock the secrets of human intelligence, cure Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, and if not rule the world, at least become very rich and powerful. Dyer dispatches his trusty henchman to bring him a test subject, then disappears completely from the movie for the next hour.
Meanwhile, solitary widower Hemant Rastogi (Yatin Karyekar) has died. While investigating, the lead inspector (Sharat Saxena, in one of his rare non-evil roles) discovers that Hemant wasn’t quite as solitary as everyone though; he has a son, Tejas (Akshay Kapoor) who has been hidden in the basement for the past eighteen years.
Tejas is . . . strange. He’s completely hairless, extremely sensitive to light, and just as shy and frightened as you’d expect from a man whose only human contact since he was a small child was his own father. He’s also extremely well read, having had nothing else to do for the last eighteen years, and he claims he can remember every word on every page of every book he’s ever read. The inspector consults with Purva Rana (Divya Mirza), and the two decide that the best possible way to help this sheltered young man to return to human society would be to send him to the home for troubled youth run by her father, Pushkar Rana (Jayant Kripalini).
(I’m really not sure just what this home for troubled youth is supposed to be, honestly. The inmates attend classes and wear what look like school uniforms, but Tejas is explicitly in his early twenties, the other students appear to be the same age, and no one comments on any age difference. It appears to be, for want of another term, a sort of ‘Reform College.’)
After a long drive, during which Tejas gets to demonstrate his butterfly whispering skills, Purva gives him a uniform and contact lenses which magically cure his light sensitivity, then she takes him to the lunchroom, introduces him to the other students, and then leaves. It doesn’t go well. The local bully immediately tries to force Tejas to wear a spoon on his nose. Tejas responds by rubbing the spoon, which magnetically draws all the other spoons in the room into a spoon tower, which looks like . . .
The bullies keep tormenting Tejas (because taunting the quiet, repressed guy with supernatural powers is always a good idea!) while the staff treat him with either indifference or active hostility. He’s a fragile, special soul, too good for this world, and Tejas keeps suffering nobly, while demonstrating the odd amazing power, and then, suddenly, things get better. And that’s when the mad scientist returns.
Alag is a prime example of a movie that doesn’t know what it wants to say. Tejas is set up to be a Messianic figure, but he really doesn’t bring any message more profound than “Don’t shoot pigeons for fun” and “Please stop hitting me.” The film may be trying to make a statement about how society isolates and torments people who don’t fit in, but that is already obvious to anyone who attended middle school.
And then there’s Doctor Dyer. Most of the movie has a reasonably naturalistic, if solemn and self-important style, but all the scenes involving Doctor Dyer are completely over the top. While Tejas is not a superhero, Dyer is a gleeful supervillain. While the Dyer scenes are fun, though, they have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the movie; it’s like Mogambo showing up at the end of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai to steal little Anjali’s lunch money.
And as tacked on as the villain is, he’s still more integrated into the movie than the romance plotline. Naturally Tejas falls in love with Purva, since she’s the only woman he knows, and the only person who treats him with any sort of respect or decency. But the grand and completely inappropriate romance is confined to two songs and one line of dialogue, and seems to have been included just to add an extra note of tragedy to the end of the movie, just in time for a crowd of major Bollywood celebrities to sing over the credits about how special and alone Tejas is. It’s not so much emotional manipulation as shouting to the audience, “You there! Be sad! Right now!”
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