Parineeta

Calcutta in the sixties. Lalita grows up in her uncle's house and has been with Shekhar from the house next door since childhood; neither of them says what it is. Shekhar's father is a wealthy businessman and holds the debt of Lalita's family. Another man, Girish, enters, and Shekhar draws the wrong conclusion. Pradeep Sarkar directs in his first film. Vidya Balan plays Lalita, Saif Ali Khan plays Shekhar and Sanjay Dutt plays Girish. The source is Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's Bengali novel of 1914, which had been adapted for the screen several times before. Vidya Balan began in cinema with this film and the part is taken as the start of her career. Its strength is the period design. The Calcutta of the sixties, the houses, the clothes and the music are built in detail; Sarkar came from advertising and the visual care comes from there. The music is by Shantanu Moitra and the songs became the best known thing about it, with lyrics by Swanand Kirkire. The subject is not speaking. The entire crisis between Lalita and Shekhar comes from neither of them saying a direct sentence, and the shape of the novel joins that to a question of class. Who it is for: viewers who like Indian period melodrama and literary adaptation. Who it is not for: the narrative is slow, the conflict rests on a misunderstanding, and the ending stays inside the classical shape.