Cert 15
134 mins
BBFC advice: Contains strong violence
The weather was so hot it reminded me of the famous 60s film The Day The Earth Caught Fire.
My body was telling me that it needed to stay on our sofa watching cricket. The demands of the everyfilm quest meant we had to drive to Birmingham.
And so it was that we arrived at Odeon, Broadway Plaza for Kunthapura, a part Malayalam/part English drama about the fight for Indian independence.
I have read a bit about Joe Eshwar's movie and the difficulties in getting it to the big screen.
This isn't a main-stream Indian film and so its finances have been tricky and its gestation period has been two and a half years.
On seeing the movie, I couldn't help wondering whether some of the issues surrounded the fact that it is overly ambitious.
In all honesty there are so many strands to its first half, that Mrs W and I were a bit lost by the interval.
During the intermission I overheard the three others in the cinema discussing the creation of the movie and, in particular, Anu Hasan, its lead actress.
The trio were animated and, obviously, excited by the Kunthapura project and yet within 20 minutes of the second half beginning they all left the cinema not to return.
Anyway, let's examine those strands.
The picture begins with an old man (Charuhasan) being dumped in a sack at a landfill site. Then there is focus on a TV documentary crew who are filming an episode of "65 years of Indian independence.'' Cut to Liverpool and an English woman whose grandmother has died, leaving a suitcase full of mementos from her time in India. Cut again to India, circa 1928, when the indigenous people are on the rise against the British.
On the face of it, none of this should be tricky to follow but within each thread were yet more tangents and, trust me, without background knowledge, it was a bit like knitting fog.
There were so many characters it was impossible to gain empathy with any of them and this was made worse by the fact that the synchronicity between sound and lips was way off.
I know that, in Indian movies, sound is applied after filming but I struggle to understand why.
In particular, it seemed very odd that a couple of the British actors' voices were much more dramatic than their actions.
By the conclusion of the film its strands did come together but I felt that it would have been none the worse if a couple of them had been excluded from the final cut.
This would have allowed concentration on scenes in the village of Kunthapura where most of the action took place. I was particularly intrigued by the battle between the Indian freedom fighters and the indigenous police who were doing the dirty work of the British.
This is where the movie had its heart and we needed to know more about the village hothead, played by Biyon.
But too little time was spent on this arena and too much was spent on a Liverpool-based storyline and the modern-day TV doc.
Laughs: none
Jumps: none
Vomit: none
Nudity: none
Overall rating: 3/10