Film: Noor
Director: Sunhil Sippy
Cast: Sonakshi Sinha, Kanan Gill, Purab Kohli, Manish Chaudhary
Rating: 2 stars
It’s only natural that Saba Imtiaz’s Karachi, You’re Killing Me would find home in popular cinema. It has everything. A wisecracking, self-aware, not so self-assured young journalist navigating the dangerous, dramatic city of Karachi, trying to find herself and her big story. It is replete with everyday characters that’ll appeal to the privileged audience it unabashedly targets – a little discontentment in their lives and they head to Dubai .
Only in Sunhil Sippy directed Noor, Noor Roy Chowdhury (Sonakshi Sinha) takes that break when life isn’t going her way, in London. There is appropriation and then there is gross misappropriation. The writing is credited to Althea Delmas-Kaushal, Shikhaa Sharma and Sunhil Sippy, and you wonder what was so complex that three minds couldn’t manage what Saba Imtiaz did so well in the book.
It’s not always a crime. Adaptations mess with book plots in huge ways and make good to great films out of them. But there is always a book’s soul and some honesty in characterizations to keep in check. Noor almost fails in every way and doesn’t work even if you remove Karachi! You’re Killing Me from your mind.
Noor loses everything going for it by making its protagonist check her privilege while it should have been about what she can accomplish with everything at her disposal. An embarrassing monologue serves dual purpose of being Noor’s homecoming and the film’s crowning piece. In trying to be current or today, Sippy puts Twitter and Facebook on screen, and also as plot elements.
A traditional news cycle is lamented as death of journalism while a day old viral video is celebrated as career making. Twenty-eight thousand followers on Twitter is hailed as resume worthy while the not so life altering fact is even Kamaal R Khan has millions in number. A compelling micro story about a single character loses its essence by trying to be a macro story about Mumbai, journalism and other words thrown at you with sincerity reserved for banal platitudes.