Last Monday I, along with my cousin, went to watch The Last Lear at Nandan. Starring Amitabh Bachchan, Preity Zinta, Arjun Rampal, Shefali Shah , Divya Dutta and Jishu Sengupta, The Last Lear is director by Rituparno Ghosh. The story is adapted from veteran actor and director Utpal Dutt's drama "Ajker Shahjahan". I missed out the first couple of minutes of the title scroll; I later found this information on imdb.Harish Mishra aka Harry [Amitabh Bachchan] is a retired Shakespearean actor, who comes in contact with Siddharth [Arjun Rampal], who is a film director. Siddharth wants Harry to perform in a role in his upcoming film. He spends time with Harry and convinces him for the role. They go for an outdoor shooting in the hills along with others. There, something happens that changes Harry's world and life for ever. I am not saying what happens, in case some of you get interested in watching the film after reading my post.Amitabh Bachhcan , as Harish Mishra, is as ususal at his best. Nobody else deserves to enact Harish Mishra. Harish sports long white mane, wears dark robes, stays in a old world house and reminds one of Shakespeare's tragic heroes from the very beginning. He loves to be called Harry, not Harish. Shakespeare sits in his blood. He can recite any part of any play at any given moment, and throws an uninitiated journalist out of his house because the latter could not mention Midsummer Night's Dream even after hearing the names of the characters. His dream was and still is to enact the role of King Lear. It was a project he abandoned for personal reasons, when he abandoned theater as well.Shefali Shah plays Harish's partner, Vandana. The age difference is obvious. I assumed her to be his young wife, but I later read in an interview of Shefali that Vandana is not married to Harish. The marriage or nuances of the relationship is discussed nowhere in the film. But we come to know from Vandana's discussion with Shabnam, the lead actress of the film, played by Preity Zinta, that she fell in love with Harish after watching his act, and packed her bags off to come and settle down at Harish's place. Vandana is impetuous while being caring and concerned about the ailing man in her life. It is not easy to dismiss her.Arjun Rampal plays the sedate film director Siddharth. He is the man who dragged Harry out of his cloister. But he does not come to visit the ailing man. Rather, he remains busy with his first show on the eve of Diwali. Arjun Rampal shares most of the screen space with Amitabh Bachhan and has given a commendable performance compared to his previous films.Preity Zinta as the actress and Divya Dutta as the Christian nurse Ivy perform their role well too. Divya Dutta does an impressive rendition of the stubborn yet helpless nurse. Through their interaction overnight, the three women form a camaraderie.Young actor Jishu Sengupta plays a pivotal role in the film. He is the narrator of the story. He is the journalist mentioned at the beginning, and one who informed Siddharth about Harry.As with most of Ghosh's film, the whole story is heavily shot indoors. The film shooting scenes are shot in outdoors in a hilly landscape. Some of the warm moments of the film comes in this section, when the stage actor confronts the technicalities and complex ways of film making.I personally felt that the film could have been made in Hindi or Hindi-Bengali with an English subtitle. The English that is used in the film is very much an Indianized version of the language, with loads of Hindi and Bengali interspersed. But perhaps Ghosh wanted the grandeur of the Shakespearean verse to stand high against the casualness of daily English, thereby projecting Harry in the Tragic loftiness he deserved.I also felt perhaps I should have been more acquainted with "King Lear" to understand the tragic proportion of the consequences of the story of Harish Harry Mishra.
