Movie Review: Morning Raga

Morning Raga was an absolutely stunning movie, I mean that mainly in visuals. If the music does not appeal to ones sensibilities, at least the visuals will. It features a lot of standard south indian carnatic music, not to mean that it is not great.
Morning Raga (2004) is directed by Mahesh Dattani, (whose previous movie was again an offbeat movie- Mango Souffle). The movie is mainly in English with Telugu interspersed here and there.
Morning Raga has a simplistic story which leaves one free to take in the visual & musical splendor. Shabana Azmi is 'Swarnalatha' who is a musician in the village. Her accompanist on the violin (Vaishnavi) is the mother of the main protagonist 'Abhinay' (Prakash Rao). The other female protagonist is 'Pinkie' (Perizaad Zorabian) who is also musically inclined.
The movie starts with a great title song which also moves the movie forward and gives one a sense of the life 'Swarnalatha' leads and the important relation between the Singer and the Accompanist. Her dream is to sing in the city and she gets her break to perform in the city though her accompanist does not want to leave the village to go to the city. As movies go the bus in which Swarnalatha, her son Madhav, Vaishnavi, Abhinay are travelling to the city collides with a car driven by a drunk man on a bridge, causing the bus to plummet down killing a lot of people including Madhav and Vaishnavi. Leaving Abhinay motherless and Swarnalatha filled with guilt and childless we zoom forward 20 years to a time where Abhinay is in his probably late 20s working on creating Jingles for ads. He quits and moves back to the village, where his father (Naseer) is a landlord/landowner. He does not care much for managing the land and wants to start a music group.
He meets Pinkie in the village in an accident (it is a movie, afterall). He re-connects with Swarnalatha, falls in love with Pinkie, creates a music group and resolves the guilt among them and moves onward to create great music. (Of course Pinkie has a past which connects hers to theirs, afterall what was she doing in the village one would be bound to ask).

The movie is based in a village in Andhra and Hyderabad. It is a juxtaposition of the traditional village with the Ipod/Powerbook totting genXer. Shabana Azmi is great in her role, in comparison to whom the rest do not have as much depth in their characters, but Prakash Rao does a great job, being the proud young man; Perizaad is perfect for the city girl who stands out and she seems pretty good in her role. The other members have very little to contribute as such. The photography seems very well thought out as is the wardrobe for the characters.

The real talent though is the visuals and the vocal music. Some of the contrast of playing music in fields was pretty interesting. While the topic can seem overly pretentious, it does not come across as such. While I am not sure if carnatic music snobs would appreciate it, but in the current time when the current generation is so disconnected with the rich musical past which India possesses movies like this can help rejuvenate an interest. And any movie which is not about dancing in the streets of Switzerland or on the Brooklyn Bridge wearing Gap clothes should be appreciated for the different movie which it is.