Ludo Review- An entertaining screwball tragicomedy about perspectives
Anurag Basu’s Ludo is a two and half hours long anthology of love stories delivered through colorful frames and powerful performances. It is a hyperlink film whose four narratives represent four colors of the board game. Just like the game in real life, the game in the reel life also begins when the four stories get intertwined with the dice.
In a Seventh-Seal like set up, the film unwraps itself with a bearded mythological figure (played by Basu himself) pontificating about life and its complicated unanswered questions. We get introduced to the actual story with the charismatic appearance of Rahul Satyendra Tripathi aka Sattu Bhaiyya (Pankaj Tripathi) with gun strapped on high on thigh. His one incident sets off a chain of events that has consequences for people known and unknown to him. Ludo just like the real game has a fantastic color composition. The yellow token starts its adventure with the road trip of Akash Chauhan (Aditya Roy Kapoor) and her ex girlfriend Shruti Choksi (Sanya Malhotra) in order to erase the source of their leaked video. The Green token begins its journey when a fussing Mithun- Da fanatic and one sided lover Alok (Rajkumar Rao) embroils himself in an imbecile quest to free his ladylove, Pinky’s (Fatima Sana Shaikh) husband from jail. The blue token features the struggle of Rahul (Rohit Suresh Saraf), a salesman and Sheeja (Pearle Manney), a nurse for their existence and their imminent danger with a mysterious suitcase of cash. The red token has a same yet different journey where Bittu Tiwari (Abhishek Bachchan), a sullen ex-gangster and an estranged father finds warmth and answers from a little girl who wants to fake her kidnapping in order to get attention from her parents. All of these stories rather tokens have a common connecting link, in other words, a dice which helps the tokens to find out a movement. And here it is the ruthless don, Sattu Bhaiya who enters by smashing down a green door, goes away with a red van, gets injured in a yellow fire and gets hospitalized in a blue room.
Pankaj Tripathi is indisputably an outstanding performer but playing the role of a criminal-mobster is nowadays as challenging to him as singing a romantic song to Arijit Singh. Aditya Roy Kapoor does a decent job in the role of Akash Chauhan, a ventriloquist and Sanya Malhotra beautifully showcases Shruti Choksi’s penchant for rich husbands. But in a situation where the audience knows but the two characters don’t know that they are made for each other, actors don’t have adequate space to expand their wings. One can easily connect with Alok’s helplessness because of Rajkumar Rao’s flawless performance. The way he cries and celebrates agony through the dance movements of Disco-Dancer, one can’t help but feel his silent screams. Fatima does a pretty good job as Pinky who unwillingly fires the bullet of destruction. In a scene where Bittu takes a glimpse of her own daughter, Abhishek Bachchan has proved only with his eyes that he is not a great hero but definitely a better actor. Pearley Manney and Rohit Saraf have played their respective parts convincingly. The individual stories just like the individual tokens of real ludo revolve around only four characters. Anurag Basu has created all of the female characters in such a powerful way that they can become the driving forces to help the male characters to take the narrative forward in order to keep pace with the rhythm of the game.
Basu has been able to interweave four floating plots into the coast of a single story. Despite interludes of violence, heartache and pathos, Basu proficiently ensures that the overall tone remains feather light so that the audience can enjoy the whole story. The primary requirement for a good film is a good story and Basu definitely has one. The dialogues by Samrat Chakraborty have a few shinning portions but they shine well in those portions. Terrible things happen to many people in Ludo while others do terrible things but Pritam’s music creates a soothing effect over all the montages along with a rendition to Beethoven’s 5th symphony. This time, Anurag Basu plays the role of a cinematographer too along with Rajesh Shukla and captures some of the best frames of 2020. From Ashish Dawyer’s costumes, Abhishek Nair and Shijin Melvin Hutton’s sound to Anurag Basu’s production designing, everything works picture perfectly. Ajay Sharma could have done a better final cut by making the length crispier. Ken Metzker’s color grading deserves an honorable mention, here. In Ludo, you may find various cinematic influences of Anderson and Tarantino. You will also get the Anurag Basu long landscape shots. But the most interesting part of Ludo is that it neither advises nor preaches the audience. It just removes the dust from some simple silent questions. The film may appear frothy from its surface, but beneath the lights it manages to make a point about materialism, true love, and parochialism.
In an early scene in the film, a song from the 1951 blockbuster Albela gets played on a television set celebrating the ruthlessness of fate. The betajis and babujis that the song refers to are the trouble-prone tokens of ludo whose throws of the dice rarely deliver the numbers they need in order to reach home. The game, ludo may not throw curve balls at you but it is deadly dicey. So does life. It’s unpredictable. But it’s all about perspectives. The grass can be green on this side too if one adroitly waters it. In Ludo, one cannot find a logical conclusion for every plot, but as a sutradhar reminds us, there are no easy answers to life’s most complex questions. The address for conclusion is the most complex question. And certainly, it’s from my perspective. In a cacophonous world of mainstream Bollywood where banal stories in a bizarre storytelling process have become the conventional idea of filmmaking, Anurag Basu’s Ludo is unconventional, whacky and promises a warm smile on your face.
Ludo is streaming on Netflix.
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