Ludo: A Review of Basu’s Latest Film

Soch sahi hain Madam, zamana galat hain”. Aditya Ray Kapur’s character, Akash, has pretty much erased the gap between reel and real lives. Although Ludo, a dark comedy crime directed by the Bong maestro Anurag Basu, deals with four main lives, these very words by Akash pretty much sums up the entire film.

Ludo basically deals with the concepts of karma-dharma, life and death. The game of Ludo has been used as a metaphor and structural skeleton. The film starts with Basu and Pankaj Tripathi, comtemplating life and death, while playing ludo. The game they play correlates to the lives of Sattu Bhaiya, Akash, Alok Kumar and Bittu.

Director: Anurag Basu

Main Cast: Pankaj Tripathi, Rajkumar Rao, Fatima Sana Shaikh, Aditya Ray Kapur, Sanya Malhotra, Abhishek  Bachchan, Rohit Suresh Saraf, Pearle Maaney, Inayat Verma

Rating: 8.5/10

Plot of Ludo

Sattu Bhaiya is a notorious gangster, who has to bury the hatchet with his once-right-hand, Bittu. Thus, they form the red square of the Ludo board. Akash and shruti form the ywllow square. They find out a video of them having sex on an adult website. Thus, starts their hunt for the culprit before Shruti’s fiance finds out.

Sheeja and Rahul, a Malayali nurse and a struggling small town boy respectively, find Sattu Bhaiya’s treasures. Thus, Sattu’s gang starts chasing them. This forms the blue square. Pinky, Alok’s sweetheart, seeks his help when her husband becomes a suspect of a murder case.

These four stories become entangled in a series of events, leading to a thrilling climax. All of them reach “Home” and win the game.

Reviews and Insight

Ludo strikes with an interesting premise. The catchy opening track, a compelling start and a quirky build-up manages to set an intriguing tone. As the multiple characters get introduced with the spotlight on each backstory sequentially, slowly fitting into pieces of a puzzle. But before one can wholly invest in a character, the baton moves on to another.

Ludo is the perfect marriage of dark comedy and sweet romance. Hats off to all the actors!! It doesn’t go by saying how immensely talented Rajkumar Rao and Pankaj Tripathi are. But Kapur, Sanya, Fatima, Rohit and Pearle have raised the bar, and set a standard for their contemporaries. Abhishek Bachchan is like a dormant volcano. He’s erupting with his good old acting skills, but the best is yet to come, I guess. The director, Basu, is and will always be the Shakespeare of film-making.

Ludo is not a lengthy movie, but the manner in which it jumps from one story to another becomes monotonous. The way the four stories merge into one is well-directed and well-written. But the resolution it gets to might seem a bit generic. The middle part of the film is where it starts developing a crack; it could have been more detailed. Ludo is written with clear precision and clean construct. The background scores and the music is undoubtedly the peak of their category. “O Beta Ji…” to Arijit Singh’s soulful “Aabaad Barbaad” strike the right chords among us.

 

 

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