Amal has been reviewed in a few American newspapers, all excellent reviews with acolades.
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/new ... fd89a235ebIndian fable eyes meaning of happinessJay Stone, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Friday, April 18, 2008
The movies are always telling us that plucky little poor guys are happier than the corrupt big shots, a perception that young Canadian director Richie Mehta has no intention of contradicting. The twist in Amal, his breakthrough feature, is that the film takes place in India, where notions of wealth, poverty and spirit are a lot closer to the ground and, in his telling, a lot sweeter. Think of Amal as Frank Capra goes to Delhi.
Amal (played with a winning deference by Rupinder Nagra) is the driver of an auto-rickshaw, a three-wheeled contraption that scoots through traffic, although not as efficiently as the subway that is being built beneath his feet, a development that hangs over the film and lends it an extra poignancy. Amal is decent, honest, polite, kind and happy, especially when Pooja (Koel Purie), a pretty shopkeeper, is in the back seat. Amal never says anything, but you suspect that one day he will make his cautious move.
This romance of simplicity is interrupted by G.K. Jayaram (Naseeruddin Shah), who is one of those Capraesque characters we don't see much in films any more: the eccentric millionaire. Dressed like a vagrant, he is visiting various establishments around the city, harassing people, trying to cheat them, and then complaining. It turns out that he is looking for a spiritually enlightened man, someone decent and honest and so on, and when he gets a ride in the back of Amal's rickshaw, he's found his man. "You're an idiot," G.K. tells Amal, with all the affection he can muster. "You'll die broke."
Or will he? G.K. dies shortly after, and his will gives his lawyer 30 days to find a mysterious auto-rickshaw driver named Amal. The simple man is about to have all his problems solved, except insofar as he doesn't have any.
However, the hunt for Amal is more complex than that: G.K. had two sons, both eager for their inheritance, especially Vivek (Vik Sahay), who needs the money to keep a vicious loan shark at bay. Then there is G.K.'s old partner (Roshan Seth), who could share in the proceeds if he somehow didn't find Amal in the required time period.
It's a situation just set up for last-minute heroics and the kind of lessons Capra liked to impart -- he was a great one for giving rich people their comeuppance -- but Mehta is more interested in making something immediate. Adapting a short story by his brother Shaun, he turns Amal into a kind of documentary tour of an Indian city (the film was shot guerrilla style on the teeming streets of Delhi and it's alive with the sounds of commerce and complaint), and the moral serenity of one man within it.
The plot -- with its high-caste manipulators trying to get their hands on the money and its low-caste heroes who sacrifice their meagre savings to help a little girl who was hurt in a car accident -- could have been cloying, but Amal is charming rather than sentimental. Part of it is sleight of hand: money doesn't matter in the movie except when it does, and when the poor need it (for reasons of compassion rather than greed) it's rewarded, while when the rich want it, it's punished. You forgive the movie that, though, because it is a fable, and because it is so engagingly told. Richie Mehta's is an authentic new voice in Canadian cinema, and Amal feels like the start of a career worth watching.
"I was once told that the poorest of men could be the richest," the voice of G.K. tells us in the film's first scene, a sentiment that sounds like the justification for economic imperialism, but becomes, at the end, a happy truth. Money may buy happiness, but who cares if you're happy already?
Amal
Rating 3 1/2Starring: Rupinder Nagra, Koel Purie, Naseeruddin Shah
Directed by: Richie Mehta
Written by: Richie Mehta and Shaun Mehta (In English and Hindi with English subtitles)
http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolo ... a6&k=61511Toronto filmmaker's Amal is an endearing fableRichie Mehta travelled to India to shoot feature film
Michael D. Reid, Victoria Times Colonist
Published: Sunday, February 10, 2008
VICTORIA - It's a good thing Bart Simpson wasn't in New Delhi when Richie Mehta was filming Amal.
If Bart had yelled "Don't have a cow!" it would have fallen on deaf ears. Just ask the crew.
Mehta, 29, was determined to have a cow - a certain real one, that is - in his debut feature.
It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment - a big old cow happily helping herself to an open sack of flour in a bustling marketplace before licking her face amid a powdery mist. It was a shot he had to have - even if it meant several takes.
"It's a small detail, but it's important," says Mehta, relaxing in the lobby of the Chateau Victoria after a late-night dinner.
The Toronto-based filmmaker of Indian heritage is here to speak at Victoria Film Festival showings of his endearing modern-day fable about a disillusioned billionaire vagabond (Naseeruddin Shah) who posthumously stuns his greedy relatives by leaving his fortune to a humble auto-rickshaw driver (Rupinder Nagra) who had restored his faith in humanity.
The cow-in-the-marketplace sequence typifies the colour that enriches Mehta's warm-hearted, deliberately simple film that so winsomely captures the city's bustle and co-existence of upper caste wealth and abject poverty.
The scene was inspired by a commotion Mehta and Nagra stumbled upon in 2003 when they travelled to India to shoot a low-budget "exercise" that became Amal, his award-winning short he would expand into a feature.
"The owner comes out and he's screaming at the cow and there's nothing he can do," Mehta recalls, laughing.
"It was so funny. Things that we deem bizarre, like cows and monkeys integrated into this society that has Internet and cellphones...this is just how they live. They have to reconcile both worlds."
The film itself is based on a true-life observation made by Mehta's brother, Shaun, when he was completing his Masters studies in India. After months of taking auto-rickshaws, he was so moved by a driver who not only charged a fair price but refused to accept a tip that he wrote a short story. It became the basis for the screenplay the brothers co-wrote.
"We were just winging it," says Mehta, reflecting on filming of the short. "We said, 'Let's sit down and mine some of these themes and work hard,' and I think we struck oil."
Amal - opening nationwide in April - is racking up accolades, including a spot on the Toronto International Film Festival's Top Ten Canadian Films of 2007 list.
Although it's unabashedly sentimental, Amal is praiseworthy for how it addresses the economic disparity personified by the cantankerous tycoon and the rickshaw driver unknowingly designated as heir to the old man's fortune.
Within a fable-like structure, its theme that "sometimes the poorest of men are the richest" is dramatically conveyed.
Mehta says his approach - a blend of the conventional and the mystical - was by design.
"I wanted to make it as easy as possible for western audiences to find an entryway into this culture," he says. "It seems different in so many ways to us but I feel it's exactly the same. It's just completely visual."
He says it would be the same if a billion people were crammed into B.C. or Ontario.
"Actually, it would be worse," he says upon reflection. "There seems to be a harmony in India. If a billion people can co-exist in that chaos I think there would be rivers of blood if you were to put that somewhere else."
The film vividly captures that chaos - the begging, haggling, traffic-choked streets, roaming cattle and human altercations.
Mehta shot his movie guerilla-style, allowing for some shots that could be captured solely by himself, cinematographer Mitch Ness and his camera crew. It put them - and the audience - smack in the centre of vehicular chaos and more.
"We'd just do it. It was 'run and gun,'" he says, grinning.
To give crews a sense of Amal's milieu, they stayed in apartments in his neighbourhood rather than in hotels. "We had a whole life experience. It wasn't just us going into the streets, shooting and then leaving."
Shooting a $1-million film with 45 locations in 29 days - with Mehta fever-struck half the time - was a logistical nightmare.
One unexpected obstacle was when he filmed a scene where Shah's character exchanges money with the selfless rickshaw driver in the huge Delhi marketplace Connaught Place. He found himself scrutinized by 4,500 people who showed up hoping for a glimpse of the famous Indian actor despite filming on a Sunday morning when it was closed and there would be less traffic.
"I thought, 'He looks like a vagabond. Nobody will recognize him,'" the affable filmmaker recalled. "But they all wanted to get to him. He's like the Al Pacino of India."
When police couldn't contain the crowd, a crew member suggested they use white string as a barrier.
"It was amazing," Mehta said. "The ADs [assistant directors] held the string up and nobody would pass. It was sacred."
Despite the challenges of shooting in Delhi in November and December of 2006 when temperatures plummeted to zero at night and averaged 15 at most during the day, the stunning imagery they got made it worthwhile.
It gives the film a visual warmth that balances gritty realism with a fable-friendly mystical quality.
"There's so much fog in Delhi in winter you get this really beautiful soft light. The sun is low-hanging, and you get this mist in the air," Mehta says. "It's magic hour all the time."
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