Such a long journey!
By Ervell E.Menezes

SUCH A Long Journey is a warm, humanistic story of life in a Parsi community and how its central character Gustad Noble (Roshan Seth) is able to endure the many trials and tribulations and yet keep his faith, sanity and family together.

Based on a novel by Rohinton Mistry, this many-layered, wryly humorous story is set in Bombay in 1971, the year India went to war with Pakistan and our hero is a hard-working bank clerk and devoted family man Gustad. Being a Parsi it is almost taken for granted that he’ll be working in the Central Bank at Flora Fountain.With friend Dinshawji (Sam Dastoor), the ambience is well captured.

But Gustad’s problems are many. He wants his son Sorhab (Vrajesh Hirjee) to join the Indian Institute of Technology but though he passes the entry exam he refuses to go there. It is the beginning of a revolt against his father. Then his old friend Major Jimmy Billimoria (Naseeruddin Shah) gets him implicated in the transfer of a large sum of money through Ghulam (Om Puri), a local contact. Purportedly working for RAW this mission puts him under a good deal of pressure and is probably inspired by the Nagarwalla case during those years when a cashier of a bank who gave Rs 60 lakh to a client on the strength of a written note.

Shuttling between his workplace and his house the film does well to capture a major slice of Parsi culture and life. And if Warris Hussain’s Sixth Happiness dealt with the uppermiddle class society this puts its finger on the lower-middle class society. And it does so with an amazing accuracy for detail. Dilnavaz (Soni Razdan) is the perfect Parsi wife and the Westernised culture seeps through every pore of the film. The music is apt with the theme song Donkey Serenade quite appropriate. Then there’s Bless Them All and others which give ample evidence of their non-Indianness if not anti-Indianness. There’s also the local idiot Tehmul (Kurush Deboo) whose idiocy is exploited by the sorceress-like Mrs Kulpitia (Pearl Padamsee). It also shows how these near-illiterate folks are exploited by superstition.

That Icelandic director Sturla Gunnarson should have undertaken to tackle a subject like this is quite uncommon. It has its advantages and disadvantages. For one thing, foreigners shooting in India will always be captured by the exotica. And this is at times overdone. But that apart Gunnarson has managed to get under the skin of most of the characters in the film. They breathe life and at times passion. They are well rounded. And for this much of the credit goes to scriptwriter Suni Taraporewala who by now is quite a veteran in her field.

May be Kurush Deboo tends to overact as the idiot but the others are perfectly natural. Roshan Seth who keeps shuttling from the brilliant to the mediocre (after his Nehru role in Gandhi) is very realistic, living every moment of this rather difficult part and he is adequately supported by Soni Razdan as the typical Parsi wife. Ranjit Chowdhary as the pavement artist comes off well but it is Sam Dastoor as Gustad’s colleague in office who is perfectly natural. Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri and Pearl Padamsee provide other cameos and the ambience of Bombay and its bylanes is also well shot by cinematographer Jan Kiesser.

For those who want to see middle class life in Bombay, Such a Long Journey is a must. For Parsis, naturally, it will have an added significance.