Art & Entertainment

Sur

Tanuja Chandra manages to play out the cliches cleanly.

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Sur
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Orchestral manoeuvres in Ooty is what this film directed by Tanuja Chandra and produced by Pooja Bhatt is all about. Being trumpeted in the movie market as "the melody of life", Sur shows Chandra breaking off from her Dushman and Sanghursh evil-obsessions. Here she composes a simple, musical script, which debuts soulful singer Lucky Ali (of O Sanam fame) and small-screen actress Gauri Karnik. Playing Svengali and Prof Higgins all at once, Lucky Ali as Vikramaditya Singh is a maestro who gets struck by Gauri Karnik, 'Tina Maria' singing Ave Maria in a church in Goa. And before you can say amen, he transports her to Sur, his school of music in Ooty hoping to bequeath her with his musical legacy. Sequestered in the green Nilgiri hills, Tina joins other students who do their daily workout on violins. Plenty of Vanessa Mae moments here like when Tina, who can't read a score, fits the fiddle under her chin and vibrates the bow with tremendous virtuosity.

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A bar-girl's daughter, with a hole in her socks and a song in her heart, Tina has about 180 minutes to amaze all, including Grace, with her singing—and she does. Stumbling around in a greatcoat, Lucky Ali turns from being Tina's teacher into a swaggering, drunken and jealous guru. In between, Chandra plunders scenes from Sound of Music's The hills are alive... as well as the nunnery subplot. Wittingly or unwittingly insensitive, Ali is shown singing in a graveyard, doing monkey-hoop in a church and being smuggled into a convent to rescue Tina Maria. Yet, when Tina prays to a fibreglass idol of Mother Mary, incantating Oh Mother Mary, please give me a song, you do believe her faith is for real.

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Behind the scenes, the real conductor is M.M. Kreem whose earlier scores include Is Raat ki Subah Nahin and Criminal. His connections to the Bhatt clan began with the powerful Zakhm directed by Mahesh Bhatt. In Sur while Kreem composes prolifically, the music lasts only as long as the moment. Lazy on the sound-cape, it doesn't echo any of the famous Konkani and Portuguese folksongs from Tina's Goa. What's even stranger is that there are no tablas, tanpuras or sitars at the Sur music school—unless sa-re-ga-ma painted on the walls counts as Indian music. Sur, from beginning to crescendo, is held together mostly by Lucky Ali's performance. The supporting cast, Simone Singh, Divya Dutta and Achint Kaur, do their best. Poor Harsh Vasisht as a Punjabi batman remains unexplained to the end. What Tanuja Chandra does manage, though, is to play out the clichés cleanly. Watch this one with your family and carry your 3-G cell-phone, hey you might get inspired to download a phone-tune for your Nokia in the movie hall.

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