Have you wondered how Pu La Deshpande's "Narayan" and "Sakharam Gataney" would be like if they were to be born today? What kind of dynamics would they have if they met each other? Here is your chance to watch that. Those are not the characters the movie is portraying but something more fun and complex. In fact this movie tries (and succeeds,) to break stereotypes. Here are two characters that call for a pop cultural relevance for a modern Marathi person.
Before I talk about the second protagonist of this movie, let's talk about the first one. As a society we tend to create characters that seem to uniquely belong to that culture. Like a French archetypal character would be that of a "lonely person living an unhappening life" or American stereotype would be that of a "misunderstood genius".
There are two Marathi cultural archetypes in this movie, one you might miss but other is the protagonist, Gajanan. Gajya can be classified as a Marathi archetype, not that such people do not exist in other cultures, a rough comparison can be made with Arun Pradeep's character from the movie, Choti Si Baat. Is the character Arun Pradeep an original? No, it is influenced by a British character from the comedy School For Scoundrels. So of course, people like this exist in all cultures. They can be briefly understood as single children raised either by over-protective parents or strict disciplinarians. Why I would say this is current for us is because while other cultures have woken up to the disadvantages of raising such a child we are still much behind. Many factors contribute to this, following our culture is the least of which. Mostly this kind of upbringing is the result of wanting the child to have a stable and secure life when they grow up, meaning they don't wear modern clothes, choose show biz as their career and worst still fall in love or something!
This movie explores the issues with surviving this modern world when you have been raised so. But fret not, because this is not real life our hero manages to discover his awesomeness with a little nudge from a mentor who never had any mould to shape, who was free to grow as he wished, face the sun for brightness or seek a shade if he felt, all his own doing. Battees whose name is never explained, is cool enough to serve in the college canteen when one of the servers falls ill. A place where the teacher needs to be schooled a bit before discovering his own potential.
In the movie, and in the interviews the actors have said that YZ is an attitude that we all have but somewhere in the process of growing up we stifle it and surrender to the world but they never give tell us what YZ is the abbreviation for perhaps wanting us to fill it in with whatever we wish. The music is also catchy, one of the songs, 'Arrey Krishna arrey Kanha,' is by Shabir Sable and beautifully rendered for new times.
