Barfi: Glimpses of a Beautiful World

Today if I was asked how I'd like to have my blog described, I have one word for it: "Barfi." 

This is added later: After all the obvious and unabashed plagiarism, I do not want my blog to be described as 'Barfi.'  Anything that is fake puts me off. Feel so betrayed when reading so many reports of plagiarism. Wish the director had at least acknowledged it in the movie. Even a delightfully silly movie like 'Bol Bachchan' had acknowledged it's 'inspiration' and paid a tribute to the original.
Yep, the movie is still beautiful, yet some of the magic is lost.

Barfi is a panorama of beautiful moments strung together. It lets us have a glimpse into the beautiful side of the human minds, an ideal world where there is no malice, no rancor.
The movie starts with a funny ditty and the smile on your face starts with this beginning. Just don't miss the beginning. The Chaplinesque moments within and other moments captured have you feel warm and smiling throughout the movie.
The movie is almost like Kamal Hassan's "Pushpaka Vimanam" as none of the lead actors really talk to each other. Two of the three leads are physically challenged, Ranbir Kapoor playing a deaf and dumb character and Priyanka Chopra, an autistic. The beauty of these characters is that they don't evoke pity with heart-rending OTT performances. On the contrary, you find yourself warming up to them as they are as normal or as flawed as any of us are--falling in love, being jealous and possessive, making mistakes of wrong choices but all very humane: amply demonstrated in unselfish gestures where each could have what they wanted but choose to give it up for the person they love. I am dying to reveal all such beautiful moments but then I might be giving away the story. Just one of them, my favorite scene from the movie. There is a moment is every girl's life where she starts being aware of herself as a woman. And jealousy causes this awareness in the life of Priyanka Chopra, when she sees Ranbir Kapoor interacting with another girl, Ileana. The preening in front of the mirror, quickly hiding this when Ranbir Kapoor walks in...so natural and so unexpected an emotion in the mind of an autistic girl!

A MUST watch. It's decades since such a movie was made. It has all the niceness of Amol Palekar's movies of the 70s... remember movies of  'Choti si Baath' genre? It is so easy to understand why we people keep visiting and revisiting those movies...movies with wonderful stories, with great scope for performances, where both the male and female leads have equally balanced portions...
Why the critics have stopped short of a 5 on 5 rating is incomprehensible.
Life imitates Art, they say. Will I be considered foolish if I hope that with more such movies getting made, people in the society will turn as loving to each other?