to emphasize the point Al Mujahid made: If the girl is 18, then whats the big deal??!

Well, the male lead is married. I guess that’s something of a big deal to some people. (When all you’ve got is a hammer all the world looks like a nail, right?)

American Beauty also comes to mind as a promising comparison, though I should admit that I haven’t seen Nishabd.

Would love to have someone like this in my media / video installation work.

For all the lovers of good quality cinema, ‘Nishabd’ is strongly recommended. The film has a riveting plot and Mr. Bachchan at his best.

To hell with convention. I give this film four stars out of five.

Rating ****

(By Naresh Kumar, critic ApunKaChoice)

1.http://in.movies.yahoo.com/070302/128/6crdm.html 2.http://www1.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1716410.cms….some more good reviews.

I don’t know why all this negative talk here,if any thing it should help the movie.

RGV is the master of his craft and he has proven it once again!

ARC said himself that he was pitching middle class and upper middle class people in India– in fact in Kolkata. I think it is these groups who absorbed the colonial message about “native” sex most extensively, and indeed have carried it forward on their own for a while, and these groups are still in charge of what visible signs of sexuality are permissible, and what they might call morality.

I agree that repression and pruderey are primarily middle class traits or adopted habits at the best of times. Yet I don’t think Indian royalty were openly libertarian until the early twentieth century, when the push to independence was well under way, and then it was hardly everyone. Hopefully, this killjoy malady couldn’t quite reach all poor people, although the extreme poverty and crowding that resulted from colonial suppression of economic development must surely continue to impose other strictures and cut down possibilities of associated leisure. Certainly, economic growth for the middle classes and financial security for middle class individuals were also severely compromised by the British, and the prudery could have arisen in part from that, the need to secure support for families, just as you say nowadays people are being gradually released from prudery by a positive change in their prospects. (Of course the boom is just beginning–there’s unimaginably more growth where that’s coming from, and so will there be increasing freedom of all kinds of expression.)

I’m extrapolating from the American experience of racism and sexuality, where, undoubtedly, many white people, and Jefferson most explicitly, have long assumed that they alone engaged in a more delicate, emotionally wrought and less wanton form of sex than other races. I’m not sure how the message of sexual superiority was conveyed by the British during colonial rule in India, but it seems impossible that it was not. There had to be an ongoing assertion of overall superiority and removal from bestiality to enable colonization (as much as slavery) as being just treatment of an inferior people. Some of it did happen in schools, where white priests, nuns and other authority figures spoke way down to their heathen charges. Apart from anything else, the message seems still at large– or why would white people today be offended by the way the portrayal of relative sexual sensitivity is reversed in The Rising?

Repression relies on shame and I’ve never seen or heard of shame in the West about Europeans having repopulated large swathes of the world’s landed surface in five short centuries, and at the same time no shame at all about dictating to other populations how to control their growth– much the same thing, though at a remove.