MOVIE REVIEW
Movie Review :
Mah-e-Mir
I
n its early years, film was as much about learning
something new as it was about witnessing something
larger than life on an unusually big screen. Over time,
world over, the learning bit has been compromised for
the cinematic experience. If the over-reliance on dialogue in talkies sacrificed the visual grandeur of this primarily visual medium, then innovations in sound design
made horror films a mainstream anomaly. Special effects, ironically, made Michael Bay the most successful
storyteller of our times, so on and so forth. What we’re
left with are remnants of what great storytelling used to
look and feel like. Modern day audiences, at large, are
unaware of what it’s like to surrender at the hands of the
director, both emotionally and intellectually, and witness
something that stays with you; like an arrow in the liver,
as Ghalib would put it. The fondness for easy entertainment is even more dominant in our part of the world. The
old world has almost fallen in Bollywood with producers, and sometimes even distributors, deciding on film
content today. In Pakistan, it has been dead for ages.
And the new order is in disarray: our film-makers today
are just eager on putting a film out there just so that
they can fund the next one. Amid all this urgency and
confusion comes Mah-e-Mir like a full moon on a dark
and cloudy night. Sarmad Sehbai and Anjum Shahzad’s
masterpiece stands out among the plethora of ordinary
Pakistani films by making the audiences participate in
the very mystery it tries to resolve. By cleverly investigating an artist’s romance with his imaginarium in the
presence of so many worldly issues, the film will surely
become a reference point for both upcoming artists and
screenwriters. Whether audiences would respond to
the film with as much passion as an artist would, one
cannot say.Madness David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous
Method features Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, played by
Michael Fassbender, and his mentor Sigmund Freud,
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