Parineeta, a third screen adaptation (earlier done by Bimal Roy and Anil Ganguly respectively) of Saratchandra's Bangla Classic, in Hindi Cinema, is not a classic cinema but definitely a superior, well-crafted product. Producer and Director should be applauded for picking up a literary classic and turning it into a visually great engrossing, enchanting entertainment, keeping the aesthetic values intact. A lot of good points which goes in its favor includes-brilliant cinematography (N.Nataraja Subramanian), superb art direction (art creatures), Great sound (Biswadeep Chatterjee, Leslie fernandes & others), Rich production values, of course performances are far better than what these actors are normally capable of, especially newcomer Vidya Balan, good dialogs (Rekha Nigam). To sum up, it definitely scores in technical dept. fully as in most of Vinod Chopra Productions but somewhere the effort is not able to complement in narrative dept. The Caste angle is omitted in this adaptation, which is rather a relevant step. As for direction, taking wise, framing and extracting performances, Pradip Sarkar is brilliant.. Check out the salwar-kameez wearing Lolita here as by 60s, cross-cultural dressing already existed, and is so well placed here. But yes there are negative points though quite minor in comparison-music and songs are very mediocre as this dept has the potential to score better, though the background score is better in comparison. The pace of the film is slicker, faster than is required. Some scenes require more time on screen. The film has too much of interiors or indoor shooting and exteriors/ outdoors/ locations are limited. Actress Rekha's item number is redundant. The love making scenes are also redundant and slightly, out of place as in 60s a responsible girl like Lolita could not be so liberal to let this happen in the moments of passion. In the climax, breaking off the wall leading to turn of events does not come across as much dramatic as required. A vital scene, which I don't know if finds mention in the Saratbabu's original book too- is missing in the screenplay -Saif Ali khan goes to his father and asks for big amount of money viz. 1.5 lakh which he secretly wants for her lover but his father flatly refuses sensing the reason. But again looking at the epic proportion of this magnificent drama, all this appears quite trivial. Overall it is a great effort and surely out of those dozens of ad film makers who turned to making feature films, Sarkar is only the second one to succeed, besides John Mathews (Sarfarosh). Not to be missed.
Review of Parineeta
