Movie Review: Astu – So Be
It
By Ravi Shet
Rating: 4 out of 5
#Astu is a must-watch for its realistic portrayal of #Alzheimer's disease and
suffering the illness causes to the person and their family.
Today 20th July 2016, was wonderful day, being youngest person with 127 Senior Citizens, watching heart warming movie ASTU, at special show arranged by Silver Innings, a Social Enterprise working with Elders at INOX, Dahisar, Movie.
This film revolves around retired professor and Sanskrit
scholar, Dr. Chakrapani Shastri (Mohan Agashe) also called as Appa who is moving
towards advanced stage of Alzheimer’s disease. Once respected by people for his
deep knowledge on Vedas, now Appa struggles to remember anything, including the
names of his own family members.
Appa goes missing when his daughter Ira (Iravati Harshe)
leaves alone him in car for a few minutes. By seeing an elephant passing by,
Appa gets out of the car and starts moving with the elephant like an innocent
child. From this moment, the film gets nicely divided into two phases wherein
daughter and her husband, Dr. Madhav (Milind Soman) are running from police
station to Appa’s institution where he had worked and other places in his
search. The other phase of the film runs us through flashback consisting of
string of memories which showcases range of emotions revolving around Appa’s
health. Anta (Nachiket Purnapatre), owner of elephant and his wife Channama
(Amruta Subhash) shower Appa with unconditional love and kindness.
Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukhtankar have done an excellent job
in portraying the sufferings of those with Alzheimer’s disease and their
families approach towards it. The use of
flashback in the film has been used in an intelligent way which goes very well
with the flow of the story. The concept of this film is to build awareness
about the Alzheimer’s disease and it does very well by being sensitive and at
the same time it takes care not to be overemotional by showing devastated and
chest beating moments. Each character of this film has been crafted very well
by the directors and they have extracted flawless performances from everyone.
There are many scenes in the film which will move the audiences. The only flaw
of this film is that it tends to bit dragged towards the end.
Mohan Agashe portrays his role with ease and delivers
sparklingly good performance right from showing the signs of Alzheimer’s
disease and his overall body language. Amruta Subhash and Iravati Harshe do
impress the audiences with their excellent performances. The camerawork by
Milind Jog is like icing on the cake for this film. To conclude, it is a
must-watch film for its realistic portrayal of Alzheimer's disease that
captures an old man’s gradual loss of his mental ability and family’s suffering
through this journey.
Ravi Shet
is the Co-founder of www.treatum.com,
an online healthcare portal connecting patients with right doctors. His area of
interest is writing articles and doing reviews on films and food. He can be
contacted on +91-9920576806 and ravi5552@gmail.com
