White Noise

IS 2005 the turnaround year for Indian cinema?

It began with Page 3, definitely a to-hell-with-the-formula film that did well on the box office. Sanjay Leela Bhansairs brilliant Black followed up. Vinod Pande’s Sins has been, received well. And now White Noise.

We never had it so good. Aimed at the same urban, educated, English-speaking audience, this too does away with Bolly basics and tells the story in the language that urban India speaks in. vinta Nanda’s White Noise doesn’t star the regular masala actors, doesn’t have the regular formula script and will definitely be different, it is a reality-based drama starring Rahul Bose and Koel Purie, trained in London but from Delhi.

Nanda, a leading TV director-producer and documentary filmmaker, embarks on her first feature in English, the subject, one she knows well, the heady, cut throat world of production houses involved in the relentless process of churning out saas-bahu soaps.

The film zeroes in on Karan (Rahul Bose), newly arrived in Mumbai, who joins the Lighthouse studio as a film editor. Just prior to that, he has had a chance encounter with a colleague Gauri (Koel Purie) whose good looks, personality and inner complexities fascinate him, Gauri takes refuge in work and drink, as sir is hurting from the abrupt end to a long relationship with her fo mer boss, Pawan (Aryan Vaid), who is married a playing the field.

Head honcho Malhotra (Jatin Siyal) has hired her considerable scripting talent hoping that she will resurrect one of his fading on-going television series. Karan reaches out to the pained Gauri.

White Noise, set in suburban Mumbai, is a modern comment on love, marriage, family and Mumbai itself-the city of dreams, where expression and talent are often replaced by ego and judgment.