Rang De Basanti

Director: Rakeysh

 Omprakash Mehra

Cast

  Aamir Khan

  Siddharth

  Kunal Kapoor 

 Sharman Joshi

  Alice Patten

  Soha Ali Khan

  Madhavan

  Kirron Kher

  Om Puri

  Waheeda Rehman

  Anupam Kh

Review

"Rang De Basanti" is a Bollywood film that attacks modern Indian youth and the government, all sugarcoated in light comedy and music, until it gets really heavy. But the simple-minded presentation ultimately makes it ring hollow.Oddly, writer-director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra tells his story from the point of view of a British character -- she is Sue (Alice Patten), a filmmaker who has been preparing a movie chronicling the execution of Indian revolutionaries in the 1940s, just as Britain is about to relinquish sovereignty. Sue is basing this true account on the diary of her grandfather, who was a sympathetic prison warden and witnessed the last days of the revolutionaries.

When a British film company pulls her funding, Sue quits and goes to India anyway, armed with her video camera. Her friend Sonia (Soha Ali Khan) introduces Sue to her friends, led by the James Dean-ish DJ (Aamir Khan), ostensibly so they can act in the project -- but the genial, lazy, privileged college students can't relate to the actions and words of the ancestral generation that gained India's independence.

Gradually, though, as they spend time together, they become game -- even as the star of the film turns out to be played by a man from a lower caste who does odd jobs around the college and hates the rich students as much as they hate him.

Sue is evidently filming this movie, but we never see the cast get into makeup, never see a crew. .Another problem is -- and read no further if you don't want the ending revealed -- the idiotic way they go about their political activism once they find a cause worth fighting for in today's India.