MOVIE REVIEW
movie review
Main Aur Charles
SPOILERS ALERT
he decision not to cast the Charles Sobhraj story
in the mould of an average Bollywood underworld
drama serves writer-director Prawaal Raman's efficiently mounted biopic rather well. Audiences weaned
on less demanding Hindi thrillers might find the first half
of Main Aur Charles a bit of a challenge to decipher. Its
pace is sluggish and the plot detailing is somewhat hazy.
But that appears to be a conscious part of the film's design. The director adopts an elliptical approach to the
tale and leaves a great deal to the imagination, and intelligence, of the viewer. Yet the film manages to avoid
ambiguity. The exploits of the half-Indian, half-French
Charles Sobhraj are well documented and there isn't
much that the audience does not already know about
the enigmatic Bikini Killer. That is also the biggest challenge that Main Aur Charles has to contend with, but
Raman finds a way around it by breaking the story up
into little fragments and delivering them in nuggets rather than in a one clear linear arc. Why, one might ask,
would a reconstruction of Charles Sobhraj's complex
life and times be of interest to an audience nearly three
decades removed from the time that the charismatic
criminal was nabbed by a Bombay Police inspector from
a pub in Goa after a daring jailbreak? The doubts melt
away [