‘Atkan Chatkan’ is a well-meaning mess

Somewhere in this aspirational  Slumdog Millionaire a  young woman roams around looking for  her children.We don’t know why she is there. But then, we don’t know we are there either.

Atkan Chatkan gets points for being well-meaning. But eventually it’s as  pointless as a candlelight vigil. The story of a musically inclined boy Guddu (Lydian Nadhaswaram) and his four young friends who form a band and eventually win a music contest  is so predictable  clichéd trite and over-sentimentalised that many times I found myself  cringing at  the director’s well-meaning but outdated homage to the bleeding-hearts’  club.

Of course we get the point about the hopes dreams and ambitions of  the  under-privileged. Just two weeks ago Zee5’s Pareeksha  overcome the sheer mawkishness  of  presentation with a  masterful central performance by Adil Hussain as a rickshaw puller who  aspires to educate his son.

There are no such redeeming qualities in Atkan Chatkan. The  performances are uniformly stilted  self-conscious  and  doddering with  dissociative theatrics. Everyone wants to show he or  she can act. Lydian Nadhaswaram who plays  the central role is effective when beating out a tune on a tin pan or car parts  at a scrap dealer’s. But the minute he  speaks the stilted dialogues with that South Indian accent he loses his hold over the tenuous thread of the plot.

The children are cast only because they had to b. The girl who  plays Guddu’s sister looks nothing  like him. And the singing siblings on the  bus  look like kids from well-to-do  homes with parents  who have starry aspirations. About the villainous adults, the less said the better. Early in the film Guddu hangs around with  a bunch of weirdos who treat him with abusive disdain and even make him dance with a duppatta. Hello, this is child abuse!

With a whole lot of subtlety and restrain Atkan Chatkan could have been the desi Slumdog Millionaire instead of  the bloated rags-to-riches saga that it is. Moral Of The Story: honest intentions are not a sufficient incentive to make a film. Every poverty tale is not a Salaam Bombay. This one doesn’t even come close.