Summer 2007

Director Suhail Tatari's Summer 2007 is a monstrously long picture that may have had an interesting germ of an idea, but it's so loosely written and so poorly directed that in the end it just reminds you of what detention felt like in school. There's one big problem with this film and that problem is, you don't know exactly what this film is about. Summer 2007 is Grey's Anatomy-meets-American Pie-meets-Rang De Basanti — you see what I mean? Is it a youthful comedy, a doctor drama, or a socially relevant message movie? Well, all of the above. A sort of khichdi of many things, and not a particularly delicious khichdi, I might add. Sikander Kher, Arjun Bajwa, Alekh Sangal, Gul Panag and Ulvika Chaudhary play a group of friends attending final year at a Mumbai medical college. Only thing, you never really see them 'attending' college — they're the sort of chaps who seem to spend all their time hanging out in the canteen, or partying outside — rich kids who'd rather get stoned on weekends, or pick on others who do want to do something with their lives. When they land up in a small village in central Maharashtra on a rural training project, they don't intend to stay long, but little do they realise that they're going to get sucked into the whirlpool of crime and injustice that seems to have taken over the lives of the locals there. Summer 2007 suffers due to over-writing, by which I mean the film is trying to pack in too many things all at once. Farmers' suicides, lack of medical facilities in rural India, crimes committed by moneylenders, and the general apathy of the urban youth. As a result the film lacks any real focus and seems to be going in too many different directions. The acting's pretty pathetic and the catharsis you're supposed to believe the protagonists have gone through comes across as fake. As far as I'm concerned, this film just didn't work for me. So that's one out of five for director Suhail Tatari's Summer 2007. Let's talk again in the summer after 2008 and perhaps by then we'll all have figured out exactly what was the purpose of this complicated film!