Though the latest Punjabi release titled JORA 10 NUMBARIA has a theme you have already seen several times before in Hindi cinema in many RGV and Anurag Kashyap films. But it still isn’t any usual or routine project for a major reason, you might not find mentioned in any other review written all over the web and print media. Therefore consider this as a revealing, insightful personal letter/write-up much more than just a regular review written for a new Punjabi release.
Besides I am writing this with due respect and love for every single person working in the Punjabi Film Industry hoping that the thought presented here would get contemplated in good spirits without any personal bias or grudge as a well-wisher of Punjab and its Punjabi cinema.
So here it goes.
In the last decade or so, Punjabi cinema has flourished and regained a reputed status both within the country and abroad well acknowledged by even the Hindi film industry and its known stalwarts. Our films have been successful, people have earned name and fame both and the industry has grown in many folds creating a whole new world in Punjab.
However our films have yet not come out of the deep influence of Hindi Cinema or Bollywood, unable to restore or reconstruct that lost connect with the untouched treasure of Punjabi literature/poetry and culture.
In other words, our Punjabi films at this moment look like aping the Hindi cinema close to desperation and the actors-directors-producers too seem to be making them in order to reach Bollywood one day as their final mission,
........ which in my opinion is not anything that will eventually help Punjabi Cinema as an industry in the long run.
Certainly not when the Punjabi film directors are more interested in reaching Mumbai making a Hindi film and the producers in Punjab remain more interested in calling someone from Mumbai to direct a Punjabi film.
SORRY, for me this is a clear mess we are creating, instead of sincerely & collectively working for Punjab, Punjabi Cinema and its upliftment.
Putting it differently, just think for a moment that a director like S. Rajamouli (or even RGV) made their regional language films in their respective states following their own dedicated vision, but they NEVER EVER APED Bollywood.
In fact Bollywood started considering them as GODs after stupendous success of their films even in dubbed prints.
Coming back to JORA 10 NUMBARIA, the film has a ‘beaten-to-death’ subject with nothing fresh to convey in terms of storyline or plot. But it’s a technically well-made film and has the treatment that forces you to ignore the clichéd subject and praise the overall effort wholeheartedly.
The film has a quality eye-catching cinematography giving it a finer edge, performances moving ahead than the routine story progression, music giving you a feel of the old classy creations and a few cinematic moments coming at regular intervals indicating the vision of its director capable of doing wonders. The narration specifically excels in its dialogues, clearly telling you the worth of the man behind them all perfectly versed with the regional language and its finer nuances.
So the film is bound to find appreciation both from the viewers as well as the critics and the industry itself, welcoming the arrival of an exceptionally talented director knowing his job well.
But that doesn’t satisfy me at all as a close friend and a well-wisher critic having worked together.
Making a personal statement, I honestly see a RGV or an Anurag Kashyap somewhere hidden in Sardar Amardeep Singh Gill……… as a writer-director, visualiser and final executor.
And that is so because I have never seen or met any other creator till date in Punjab (after being in the line for more than two decades) who is a legendary lyricist, a renowned blessed poet, a music expert/composer, a story-dialogues-screenplay writer, an outstanding narrator, a connoisseur of Punjabi literature, a die-hard fan of Hindi and Indian regional language films, a keen student of World Cinema and a director with a proven caliber of extracting performances from completely fresh artists and known faces too presenting them in an entirely different light like never before. (The two short films directed by Gill are another example of the same)
So for me it’s really tough to accept when even a rare personality like Amardeep Singh Gill comes up with a Hindi film clone hiding in his JORA 10 NUMBARIA ending on the exact note of GANGS OF WASSEYPUR, also duly paying a tribute to the same film in one of his key sequences.
In other words, I don’t wish or appreciate people calling JORA 10 NUMBARIA as Punjab’s GANGS OF WASSEYPUR like yet another inspired film aping Hindi cinema. Instead, I would like people from Mumbai enquiring about the director of a Punjabi film that deeply impresses and surpasses their expectations too like a S. Rajamouli film.
Addressing personally,
as a blessed writer and visionary, who has so much hidden inside in the form of untold stories, lyrics, music, social thoughts and unexplored characterisations …………….. I don’t wish to see you working on the same old rotten plots used several times before presented in a different style.
If truth be told, we are not left with many truly knowledgeable writer-poets and directors in in the present Punjabi film industry, who have a deep insight of literature and also got the courage to say the truth as it is like a true comrade.
So I don’t want you to give me the same old stories yet again acting like other commercial robots.
I want you to enlighten me with new unthinkable tales, new inspiring songs, new cinematic moments to take back home and films that I can straight away include in my Movies To See Before You Die list at BTC with immense proud.
In short, I want to see more gems coming from you with sequences such as the one in JORA, where the camera focuses on a mother’s hand covering the eyes of her small child still awake lying on the same bed where she is being brutally raped by her husband.
I want to get shaken by the films you make in the coming years and I want to see you using this medium to say all those unsaid things never tried before due to a lack of courage and will.
To be straight, I wish you to work on something fresh taking Punjabi Cinema further coming out of the awe of Hindi films finding its own identity.
As a friend, I wish to receive calls from Mumbai asking for your personal number and I am sure JORA 10 NUMBARIA is going to prove as a stepping stone to reach that cult status in the coming future soon
with
HIS BLESSINGS
JORA 10 NUMBARIA - Ratings : 3 / 5
