User Reviews

This was a movie I saw from Kannada Torrents community website. 'Garam Hawa' was Satyu's best known work in Hindi. 'Bara' comes from the baton of the same accomplished director. During one of my conversations with a friend recently I was mentioning the various genres of movies I have been watching lately and when I mentioned 'Bara', he said it was an art film. While I am one of those who hate any kind of categorization of art and principles, it still got me thinking. The one thing I realized is that there is no such thing called 'Art' film. There is only good and bad art. No amount of 'commercialization' can save a bad feature and no amount of garb can hide a good one.

Set against the backdrop of a drought hit area 'Bara' picks up momentum from the very beginning. Wide angle shots of a blistering sun over a parched landscape and dying animals greet us in the opening sequence. Satish Chandra (Anant) is the main protagonist whose eyes we use to watch the story unfold. A just, disciplined and caring man by nature, this administrative officer is yet to take a journey through the gross realities of modern day politics.

Caught between a political enthusiast Bimoji (Simha) who happens to be close associate through their fathers and a cigar smoking useless piece of a Chief Minister(unknown), Satish is struggling to keep his sanity and professional sanctity intact. Satish's life includes a mopping wife, a friend from the armed forces (Pankaj Dheer in a totally absurd role) who never seems to have anything to do except give Satish's wife some company (as a friend of course), a religiously inclined father and a son.

Local political rowdies instigate a chaos of dynamic proportions. Everything from hiding rice and wheat from the starving public to violating women and igniting a communal war takes place. All this is done just to keep their bellies full at the cost of someone else's life. The famine is used as an excuse for all of them to pursue their own personal goals. Does it mean taking lives of the innocent? So be it. Does it mean capitalizing on the corrupt administrative force that drives our nation? So it shall be.

Fighting a losing battle between all this is a tired and enraged Satish. With nowhere to turn for help he starts playing his own game by letting those who want to fight go ahead but at the same time manages to start helping out the poor by drilling bore wells. While the Chief Minister is using his own method to stay in power and extract all that is left of this already dead piece of bone, many people are made scapegoats.

'Bara' showcases the shameful tale of corrupt politics and how it strangles the desperate. It is indeed a more shameful woe that we have not yet taken a lesson from this and continue to lose one government after another with nothing happening for the common man. 'Bara' is a grim reminder of the sinful times we live in.

Technically the movie is beautifully shot with no nonsense camera work. The crowd manufacturing unit has been handled well with everyone chipping in their bit. The director does a good job in getting good performances from everyone in the feature. Music is not an integral part of this movie which is a good thing. Most 'reality-based' movies tend to get caught in the vicious "should we should we not" tangle of background scores. In 'Bara' however, music and background score are skillfully used as and when required.

Anant Nag takes the cake in the performances category once again. This actor leaves me wanting for more every time I watch his features. He effortlessly becomes the struggling government official who is resisting the role of a dummy doll at the government's hands. The actress who plays his wife - Lovelean Madhu - seems alright in her debut feature as the frustrated wife of this ever-busy husband. CR Simha plays a confidently executed foxy role of the political leader/advocate Bimoji who is out to get himself a name at the people's cost. The remaining group of performers lends apt support in their stereotypical roles in this political satire.

'Bara' is a wonderful metaphor for the famine-struck politics in our country which is displayed in its complete naked shame.

AnanthNag captures the attentions through-out the movie. One of the best movie, which has been shoot-ed in heart-touching locations of the Bidar. Director might have struggled a lot to show the intensity of the drought situations in Bidar.

This movie reflects political quarrels and their effects on the common people. A good screen-ply, which has been wonderfully adopted to the screen. AnanthNag and C.R.Simha excel in their performances. The other performers Pankaj Dheer and Ananth Wife were given justice to their roles. The movie has been carried naturally by the common people of the Bidar district.

A few years before he spread UR Ananthamurthy's short story Bara over few reels of film, MS Sathyu had directed Garam Hawa. The much- celebrated Balraj Sahni-starrer was about the trauma of Partition and hence had polarised opinions. Watching it while we were well into the 21st century, Garam Hawa seemed tame. Watching Bara almost 30 years after its first release, it seems amateurish. An honest bureaucrat works towards solving a serious drought issue in his jurisdiction in north Karnataka and realises soon that not all want it that way. There are politicians and politics aplenty and though the mood is grim, the bureaucrat's fervent push to overcome problems both man-made and natural provides the film with a rustic energy. If anything, the strange brown tint of the film syncs well with the discomfort caused by dishonesty, dust and drought. Ananth Nag and CR Simha play key roles and luckily, the only adequate performances come from them. So bad is the support cast that you really wish the District Collector (Ananth Nag) gets into more trouble so as to keep him on screen as much as possible. Yet, imagining the cost of making a film and the need to get a scene right first time, the other performances are excusable. Still, how do you get over that strange, gratuitous character of Ravi! Unless the DVD had cut something significant, he appears as the bureaucrat's unhappy wife's confidant for most part. At one instance, a fleeting moment in fact, he appears as a serious threat to the bureaucrat's marriage and towards the end, thank heavens, you are told he does have a job, of that of a police officer. And now put a face you know to Ravi, Pankaj Dheer, Karna from Mahabharatha, and see how bizarre it is. Some of the other fringe characters are just as strange. The wife, the father, the Chief Minister (his two hands, rather)… the extras… all struggle to fit in. And they don't. The story is of course predictable. There is the famine, there is the famine of honesty, then there is the famine of reason and suddenly, as if to just tick a box, there are communal riots as well. Yet, a lot of it works, for one reason. Ananth Nag is excellent as the lead. He makes you want to know what happens to him. When he goes by his gut feeling to support a person who may be dishonest, you go with his gut feeling. He chides his father for being irrational in his religiousness, but backs a blind man to find ground water with a stick. You still go with him because you know he is earnest. He may be wrong, but he is earnest. That in effect is the film's strong point. You may notice the occasional hand-held shots indoors, you may find CR Simha endurable (not with his Marathi though), but, but for Ananth Nag, this can't do much more than what a reading of Ananthamurthy's story may do.