A counter perspective on Roy – India’s first international film
February 18, 2015By Victor Mukerjee
I don’t write reviews of films, but I do read those. Not to judge a film, but to just get a gist of what people are thinking and saying about a particular movie. So when I read the reviews of Roy, I was a little surprised, because from the look of the trailers this didn’t look like a movie which could attract such harsh reviews. So exactly happened that it turned out to be such a disaster? Why is there not a single review was positive about this movie? I decided to watch it and find out myself.
And here’s what I found – In the last few years, Roy is probably the only Indian movie which can really be termed as an International movie.
I think that the reviewers should stop having Prabhudeva/ Rohit Shetty/ Farah Khan films as benchmark for Hindi films. This also makes me wonder if they only watch Oscar and Golden Globe nominated international films and review movies based on that knowledge.
Why am I being so vocal about a film? Because I haven’t seen the concept of virtual reality used in an Indian film in this manner ever before!
For us, if a character in a game comes alive in a movie, we accept it; a conman does way larger than life stunts and we flock to cinema screens to watch it; but if a character from a writers story comes alive in his world and it goes forward as he writes the story, we fail to understand it, and suddenly we need clear demarcation between the reality and the virtual reality. Spoon feeding can’t go lower than that.
What surprises me is the same reviewers watches an international film about dreams within dreams or a film about the fifth dimension and boasts about how Hollywood directors can think different. With Roy, that’s what we have achieved, we have 
finally got that ‘different cinema’
Arjun Rampal and Ranbir Kapoor were superb in their particular roles. I don’t think anyone could have done a better job than Rampal for this role. They were also backed by brilliant cinematography and background score. Jacqueline never looked prettier in any of her previous outings and played her part well. All the actors used the silence well in their dialogue deliveries which is evident from their controlled acting. I would applaud Vikramjit Singh to be able to achieve this and make the film without an ounce of extra melodrama.
The only unnecessary part of the movie was the song ‘chittiyaan kalaiyaan’ which of course looked like it was added later. Also ending the film after the song ‘tu hai ke nahi’ was another plausible option. Not that I didn’t like the last 10 minutes.
Roy is probably the first step towards intelligent cinema. Roy is our first hope out of the trash we are forced to watch week after week. Roy is probably the first Indian neo-urban love story which has a quintessential classy romance in it. With Roy, we finally have an international Indian film.
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Great review. While I think the first 20 miutes of the film really let it down, the rest of it was great. India”s first international film. I agree
I buy the counter perspective to a certain extent… because as a commercial film maker, who caters to a dumb set of audience as well, you cannot deny the underlying fact, that every great movie that the writer has been stated here, has a spot on, brilliant screenplay, which does not spoon feed any information and at the same time, clears all doubts that the writer himself created to make it thrilling and entertaining. Be it Inception, Prestige, Interstellar, or for the sake of argument, Memento, had a crisp and concise flow, which Roy lacks big time. The scenes are draggy and for the first 20 minutes, confuses the audience so much, that they would want to rewind the movie to clear the doubt. Again, my argument is not based on the story being good or bad. I am only talking about the flow.