| Mitr - My Friend (English) |
Director: Revathi
Cast: Nasser Abdullah, Shobhana, Preeti Vissa, Mathew Philips.
 Set in the U.S., ‘Mitr…’ (In English, and dubbed in Tamil and four other languages) centres round Lakshmi, a small-town girl from South India, married to Prithvi, a U.S. based Punjabi. With time Lakshmi finds herself sidelined both by her busy husband, and her westernised teenage daughter. How Lakshmi recoups her life and the family re-unites forms the rest of the story.
Commendable that actress Revathi, in her first directorial effort, has attempted to tackle a woman’s issue and taken the backing of an all-women technical crew. Commendable too, that she has tried to give a clean film, sans any violence or even any mention of sex. But then, ‘Mitr…‘has turned out to be bland and rather a flat film. With not much for the overseas or the English-speaking audience, and not much for the local audience either!
The film has quite a few rough edges, and some of the takings are amateurish, and naive. There is some confusion too in the characterisation and attitudes of the central players. In the attempt to make Lakshmi find her own footing - the clichéd way - of her attending a couple of dance classes and
carpentry lessons and having a slightly different hair-do - the characters of Prithvi and Divya are made to lose their identity, and fall in line with her. Scenes like Divya
accusing her mother of having an affair, just by seeing her hold the hand of her neighbour; or Prithvi suspecting his wife of
infidelity hearing his wife chat with a man as they approach the house, are not only out of character, but naïve too. Further, the identity of Lakshmi’s e-mail chat friend unravelled in the end is no surprise at all. For, it had already been inadvertently revealed in the earlier scenes itself.
 Fowzia, after an apprenticeship with P.C. Sriram, makes a promising debut as cinematographer with the film. Model Nasser Abdullah cuts a presentable figure all right, but a sorry one trying to fit into his role. There is not much Shobhana can do here. Even the dialogues written for her are
stagy, and the way it is delivered too sounds like someone was trying to give an English lesson! Spirited and spontaneous, debutant Preeti Vissa aptly fits into her role of Divya, her body language and expressions just right.
Malini Mannath
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