Going Nowhere

But there is absolutely nothing in Sooni Taraporevala’s script that can even remotely justify their presence in the cast. Their fate, in a way, sums up the film: Such a Long Journey is a sad tale of missed opportunities. Such wonderful source material, such a fascinating gallery of tangible characters, such a great cast of actors to play them but, unfortunately, in the end such a tedious cinematic journey: ponderous, heavy-handed, monotonous.

The film is such a far cry from Mistry’s moving, masterly, multi-layered evocation of lower middle class Parsi life in early-’70s Bombay. Production designer Nitin Desai does a decent enough job. He brings alive Byculla’s Khodadad Building—which the protagonist Gustad Noble (Roshan Seth) and his family share with a host of strange and not-so-strange inhabitants—down to the very last prop and recreates Bombay’s streets of the pre-Maruti days with an unfailing eye for detail. But the sweeping vision and emotional force of Mistry’s powerful text eludes Gunnarsson in the process of transference to celluloid. It is as if a bewitching, multi-hued tableau has been turned by some unskilled hand into a drab, unidimensional pastiche.

The plot, on the face of it, is simple enough: Parsi bank clerk Gustad’s well-ordered, if not materially comfortable, life threatens to spin out of control after he receives a parcel from an old friend, Major Jimmy Bilimoria (Shah). Although Gustad has spent much of his life amidst the smell of fresh, crisp currency notes, the parcel turns out to be a trifle too heavy for him. It contains

Rs 10 lakh in cash meant to be deposited in Gustad’s bank because, as the Major’s Bombay point man Ghulam Mohammad (Puri) reveals, it is meant for the Bangladeshi freedom fighters. Gustad grudgingly does his friend the favour, but sure enough the mystery that shrouds the whole deal pushes the god-fearing, morally upright Gustad into a trough of self-doubt, of worries he’d never known before. The situation is made worse by a series of unhappy developments—his rebellious son, Sohrab (Vrijesh Hirjee) walks out on him, his little daughter falls ill and his wife, Dilnawaz (Soni Razdan) comes under the spell of the eccentric old lady (Pearl Padamsee) who lives upstairs.

It’s 1971. Gustad’s inner struggle plays out against the external backdrop of tumultuous political events. Indira Gandhi’s firmly in the saddle and her iron hand has begun to make its presence felt; India’s on the brink of war with Pakistan and Bombay is witness to mounting social tensions. But Gunnarsson’s screen rendition of a turbulent point in India’s history is riddled with disjunctions. Neither the drama of an individual grappling with a murky moral universe nor the sense of foreboding created by the impending war are captured quite with the felicity that distinguishes Mistry’s celebrated novel.

But if Such a Long Journey fails to move you, the fault cannot be laid at Seth’s door, nor at Hirjee’s. Seth, an actor who’s rarely received the recognition he deserves, gets under Gustad Noble’s skin and deep into his heart to come up with a performance remarkable as much for its control as for its sustained intelligence. Gustad believes "only women and weak men shed tears". But when, in the film’s penultimate sequence, he breaks down while praying over the body of the mad man he’s developed an undefined bond with, Seth carries the film to what proves to be its acme. By far.

Hirjee, playing the elder son who cannot understand the demands of a doting father, matches Seth scene for scene and is at the centre of the film’s rare flashes of conviction. Sadly, several of the film’s plot strands, especially the one that revolves around Bilimoria (a character modelled on the real-life former army officer Rustom Sohrab Nagarwala, who supposedly called up a chief cashier of a bank, faking the voice of Indira Gandhi, and withdrew Rs 60 lakh) are lost in a penumbral haze. Such a waste!