Nil Battey Sannata, a common phrase often used in UP, which is used to describe hopelessness.is the name of Swara Bhaskar’s latest film. It doesn’t sensationalize. It tells you a simple story of motherhood and the value dreams hold to human beings.
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What’s Bad: A preachy end, slightly puts you back into the seat from this otherwise realistic film. These are the kind of films that prove cinema is all about story-telling and not star values! Notice the way Mrs. Diwan (the charming Ratna Pathak-Shah, again), Chanda’s retired employer, is fascinated by this term during one of their many morning gab sessions. The 96-minute movie revolves around a mother (Chanda) and her daughter (Apu).
The first half of Nil Battey Sannata is not much impressive and seen in the alike minded movies released during the past decade. However, her daughter is on the way of giving up her studies as she knows that her mother won’t be able to bear the expenses of her education. The industrious Chanda is horrified, as might audiences be, at her daughter’s ingratitude, and Iyer Tiwari does not stint from showing the consequences of Apeksha’s thoughtlessness. Ultimately, she also lands up in the same class in which her daughter is studying.
Nil Battey Sannata is going to be loved by the low and medium wage earning class of the metro cities who have big dreams. Other celebrities to attend the special screening of the film were Saqib Saleem, Tisca Chopra and Shraddha Kapoor’s brother Siddhanth Kapoor. In order to change the perspective of her daughter, she gets herself enrolled in the same school as her daughter.
The beauty of this film, however, lies at a different level.
Maths is one subject that has haunted many lives including mine and hence the portions of learning it fun away are appealing.
Very rarely do we get to see an outing by a debutante director that not only brings a smile on our faces but manages to keep it throughout the course of the film. And then you have Pankaj Tripathi as the eccentric principal. A man who is reluctant at start to accept a full-grown lady to join school but soon turns encouraging with his noble heart.
It is stirring, the way the themes of aspirations and motherhood are captured in this tale.
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In the film, Swara is a single mom and a domestic help who runs from pillar to post to make sure she saves enough money for her daughter’s education. When Chanda asks her Appu what she intends to become in life she replies – an engineer’s child becomes engineer, a doctor’s child becomes doctor and a maid’s child a maid. Riya Shukla as her daughter is correctly brattish, and her two friends and the third boy who is a genius at math are delightfully natural. The rebellious teenager hides her laziness behind poverty.
