Dhobi Ghat Review

Knew nothing about it going in other than it had Aamir. It's Kiran Rao's only directorial film. It premiered at TIFF, and it is such a film festival kind of film. Intersecting stories about various people in Mumbai, including Pratiek as Munna, the dhobi -- he was the annoying younger slacker brother in Jaane Tu...Ya Jaana Na. HE was excellent (he doesn't seem to have done much else since.) I thought Kiran using the dhobi as the connection between the characters was very smart -- it shows the "real" Mumbai, and a person like that has entre into the upper strata of life, too.

Since I had the DVD I watched all the bonus videos, and the most fascinating was how they were able to film Aamir in this run down neighborhood apartment -- by sneaking him in in the dead of night and he basically didn't leave for three weeks. Then the people in the other apartments caught on, but were bargained to keep quiet if he would visit on the last day, and the end of the bonus film was him eating at kitchen table after little kitchen table home cooked meals and taking endless pictures with families. It was adorable. Also, filming him in a crowded street scene just walking in the crowd -- how they carefully planned with hidden cameras and pulled it off was very interesting.

The film was really interesting, but I thought Aamir and Kiran were rather pretentious in the bonus casting video talking about how they struggled to find the "right" person to play the artist Arun, and that Aamir had to convince her to cast him. Please. Putting his name on this was the sure fire way to get attention for the film.