Hindi movie "Manto" was released on September 21, 2018. The film premiered on Sunday at the 71st Cannes Film Festival.
Writers are a class apart, loners and often find relief by writing fictional stories which are much closer to reality. "Manto" is a biopic of a contentious writer, poet, and writer Saadat Hasan Manto, who is renowned for his unrestrained and devil may care attitude of writing.
Directed by Nandita Das, "Manto" stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui in the lead role and also has singer Gurdas Mann, Rishi Kapoor, Paresh Rawal, and lyricist and poet Javed Akhtar in guest appearances.
Fast paced and racy
Manto was a writer known for his attitude and was a well-known name in the film industry. However then the partition of the subcontinent by the British tore him with his heart in India, he moved to Lahore. Nandita Das direction is taut, and the film starts off dramatically.
The movie is racy; fast paced and did not waste time on trivialities. Only the most critical and epoch-making events are taken up, and that is the beauty of the film.
Fiction reveals truth obscured by reality
Manto was a writer who unashamedly exposed the naked fact of the society without any inhibition. No wonder twice he was charged for obscenity and profanity in his writing. "Manto" fiction was a means of exposing the truth which reality often obscured. None of the Urdu writers of his time were so unabashedly honest like him.
Nandita Das must be credited for bringing to the fore the simmering discontent in her subject, Manto. Nawazuddin has once again proved that he is an actor par excellence.
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Nandita Das as a director has seamlessly woven the threads of Manto’s life to create a bigger picture of a writer who is besieged by religious intolerance and patriarchal mindset of the society.
The storyline also poignantly reproduces the pain of partition and the writer’s love for Bombay.
The film also brings together the finest talents in Bollywood which includes Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who has breathed life into this conflicted character he was portraying.
Kartik Vijay's photography is exceptional, and Rita Ghosh's production design once again takes one back to the pre-independence and post-independence era.
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