Reviews

Bogda Review: Literally Bores You to ‘Death’

07/09/2018

Review : Bogda (2018)
Producer : Suresh Panmand, Nanda S Panmand, Karan Konde
Director : Nisheeta Keni
Screenplay : Nisheeta Keni & Omkar Datt
Star Cast : Mrunmayee Deshpande, Suhas Joshi & Rohit Kokate
Review by : Abhay Salvi

Rating : 1.5/5

Bogda Review (Marathi Movie):

For a simpleton film watcher a quintessential “Festival Film” can be a bit boring & for those who watch films mainly at film festivals, for them, a quintessential “Masala Film” can be equally boring. But sometimes there are films which can bore both the groups equally! And those films could be inherently belonging to any of the two categories. Bogda definitely belongs to the “Festival” category but it can bore film watchers of both kinds equally!

The trailer of ‘Bogda’ was hardly two minutes long & the kind of theme it was dealing with it felt like the film would be around 100 minutes long, but the actual length of the film is 163 long minutes! And they feel like never ending! Every single scene & even the dialogues move at the pace of the turtle. The pauses taken by actors while uttering their hollow dramatic dialogues get on your nerve almost instantly as the film starts. Both Mrunmayee Deshpande & senior actress Suhas Joshi are good actors but the film never allows us to feel connected to their performance.

The conflict points, the character tracks, their dreams or motives & their backstories all of it feels plastic. The second half when the actual journey mentioned in the trailer begins we are already disinterested in the characters & their journey, yet we could have still been converted if the second half avoided the stylistic choices made by the director. But it doesn’t. It manages to make even a ‘road movie’ seem eventless. Sparing the pauses the actors take, they act in a very conventionally dramatic way, or their usual way. So even if the ‘slowness’ & ‘dryness’ was intentional it isn’t present uniformly.

While ‘Bogda’ has some good visuals that are interesting to look at if broken down in pieces & seen simply as images. As moving images they have no power. ‘Bogda’ is a film that proves simply good intentions of making a stunning cinematic film aren’t enough. A film is an amalgamation of different art forms, yes! But at the core it relies on some basic necessities, the most important of it is ‘engagement’. If a film can’t engage the viewer on a primary level, none of the visual artistry matters. Now there are different means of engagement, a narrative, an ultimate motive are one of them, which ‘Bogda’ tries to use but fails.

Yet I believe the debutant director (Nisheeta Keni) of the film has no reason to feel unsuccessful in any way! The reactions to this failure will only be helpful for her future works, & seeing her command over the ‘visuals’ she should definitely make more attempts, but this time with much more work on the script.

As said before performances of Suhas Joshi & Mrunamayee are as usual good, (sparing the pauses) but they don’t make any impact. ‘Kaul’ fame actor Rohit Kokate had an interesting character to play that never got explored to even it’s half potential. The music is decent, & contributes to the slightly interesting moments of the film in the second half. The overall boredom that the film inflicts on us could have been a lot less if the film was at least an hour less in duration. Such themes & narratives can never afford to be so long even if they are well written (Though Bogda isn’t) & executed!