The Vibhu Puri directorial will hit screens this Friday

Do you ever wonder what it would be like to fly? Then see Hawaizaada, a film that soars into the skies with its overweening ambitions and miraculously manages to stay airborne as it chronicles the life a man who wanted to fly.

Debutant director Vibhu Puri’s very accomplished film, a tribute to the scientist who apparently manned the first aircraft that civilizations has ever flown, is a stunning feast of visual splendour, compounded with a script that’s tightly and judiciously written to accentuate the audacity and eccentricity of people who can float in the future.

Straight away it can be said with great pride that Vibhu Puri’s debut is a homage to the art and visual aesthetics of Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Every frame is reminiscent of several Bhansali creations, notably Devdas and Saawariya, the former for the theme of unfulfilled love (with Khurana’s capricious love interest Pallavi Sharda forming a fusion of Paro and Chandramukhi’s two-layered character from Devdas) and the latter for the rich bold use of flamboyant colours to highlight the heightened opera-styled emotions.

Hawaizaada attempts an almost-impossible marriage of a visual splendour with emotional surrender. The characters, be it the whimsical aimless Shivkar Talpade or his kooky mentor Shastry , or the Britishers who scowl at any attempt by Shastry and Talpade to create inventional history….these are people who don’t believe in holding back emotions. When they feel show. Period.

The year is 1895. The possibilities of recreating that era in present times seems far-fetched and unlikely. Thanks to Puri’s art directors(Subrata Chakraborty0, Amit Ray), music composers(Vishal Bhardwaj pitches in with a zestful lavni filmed on the gorgeous Sharda) and most specially his incredibly gifted camera-person Savita Singh(who happens to be Puri’s wife), the director has constructed a world as unthinkable on paper as the theory of flying a plane must have seemed to Talpade’s contemporaries.

Thank God for the dreamers,back then and now.

“Hawaizaada” is a film with tempestuous ambitions. Co-writers Vibhu Puri and Saurabh R Bhave use Talpade’s dream of flying as a metaphor for anyone from any era who has dreamt of breaking free. The pronounced but Amuted metaphor is extended into Talpade’s extend family of repressed character, again very Devdas-like in its operatic structure. There is the growling father(Jayant Kripalani), tightlipped mother(Natasha Sinha), smirking brother(Mehul Kajaria), dominated bhabhi(Priyanka Sethia)….They all long to ,well, fly .

Encircling this wide arc of wannabe fliers who are piloted into the epic plot by Talpade’s navigational dreams, couldn’t be an easy task. Vibhu Puri manages the seemingly impossible maneuvering skilfully joyously and playfully through lives in an era when oppression was a pre-condition.