Painter-filmmaker M F Hussain’s Meenaxi is visually striking. But it is riddled with abstractions that are quite hard to decipher.
Being a painter by skill, M F Hussain has a knack for delving into abstractions. The way he puts colors to his canvas and brings forth the forms that more representative and less realistic, his Meenaxi is no less than a painting. But it is a creation with a non-linear story that is either completely incomprehensible or quite hard to grasp.
The film has Tabu playing a complex role of a woman who adopts three different personas in three different cities. She is the mysterious perfume trader of Hyderabad, the exotic desert bloom of Jaisalmer or the orphaned Maria of Prague.
Movie’s hero Kunal Kapoor too plays a man who wears different looks and personalities in three cities. In Jaisalmer, he is a thin man who is a deep thinker. He sports a beard, his hair is disheveled and he wears long sherwanis. In Hyderabad, he plays a rough-looking motor mechanic with long hair and his shirt tied around his waist. But in Prague he changes into a suave man who wears expensive clothes and maintains proper decorum.
There is no doubt that Hussain imbues every frame of his movie with beautiful colors and symbolic elements, but he is not a good storyteller. The narrative of the movie keeps shifting from the basic storyline to the imaginations of a novelist drained of ideas for a good story.
Sadly, this shift is sometimes too vaguely placed that it confuses a viewer regarding the placement of a particular scene or sequence in the movie. At the end, a viewer is left too confounded to decide what the movie was actually about.
Painter-filmmaker M F Hussain’s 