Film: Noor
Director: Suhnil Sippy
Cast: Sonakshi Sinha, Purab Kohli, Kanan Gill, Manish Chaudhari, Sunita Tambe.
Great novels that sometimes materialise into film adaptations tend to pique our interest as most times we know how wonderful and brilliant the book is. Most times, it is the bestsellers that draw the attention of several film-makers who wish to weave magic with their cameras just as the authors have weaved magic of their own with their pens.
The film, Noor, is based on the Pakistani bestseller, “Karachi, You’re Killing Me!” by Saba Imtiaz. Lately, India has not been too secular about giving any space or even the benefit of doubt to Pakistan, so director Suhnil Sippy has effectively changed Karachi to Mumbai.
The story traces the life of Noor Roy Choudhary who is a journalist. She lives with her sugar-sweet understanding father and a pet cat. Her life revolves around doing small and according to her, “lame stories” which are far from satisfactory to her. For the better part of the first half of the film, she keeps whining about her weight, her lack of a social life, her lack of a love life and blames the world for the shortcomings in her.
However, they do not sound like the uppity Pinterest stories as the dialogues are quite light and conversational is tone. Toward the end of the first half, Noor, through her maid, Malati, finds out about an organ-trading racket which is led by a decadent and greedy doctor. After the pretty casual and light-hearted first half which somehow, too hurriedly turns into a tragic story, viewers are now expecting an interesting investigative journalism on Noor’s part.
However, the investigative part never comes and somehow the whole fiasco is quickly solved but that is not the end. Here Noor is given a lengthy and monotonous monologue which seems to go on and on for more that 5 minutes, which, by the way is a lot of time when you are in the theatre. Her speech starts trending #I Am Noor. The doctor is quickly arrested and everything seems to have been finished hurriedly.
All in all, Noor leaves a bad residual taste in the minds of the viewers. The woes of being a small-scale journalist have not been portrayed in a proper manner and frankly, there is an overdose of dialogues and expressions. Sonakshi, however, does a good job in portraying the whiny 28year old single girl.
