Click to play videoCast: Irrfan Khan, Shobana
Direction: Kaushik Roy
Slow-learner children and the pressures that families often put on them is the theme of Apna Asmaan, in which Irrfan Khan and Shobana play the parents of an autistic teenage boy who fail to recognize their son's natural flair for art, and instead become obsessed with 'curing' his intellectual handicap.
Desperate, embarrassed and insecure about the fact that he's unlike other children his age and that he may never have a conventional education, his parents resort to the use of an experimental drug in the hope of treating him.
Now it's clear this film wants to make an important point, but surely writer-director Kaushik Roy could have come up with a story less ridiculous than this. What happens after the boy is injected with that brain-booster is so bizarre that it pretty much brings the entire film down like a pack of cards.
Apna Asmaan may have started out as a sensitive, realistic portrayal of autism among children, but it quickly disintegrates into an outlandish, exaggerated, melodrama which kills the very cause that the film claims to address.
Apna Asmaan resorts to a convoluted "what if" situation to make its central point - that all children don't have the same skills and the same strengths, and to be differently abled is not a bad thing. It's an important message, but could have been conveyed simply rather than stupidly.
I have a problem with the director's decision to take that extreme route of portraying the cured child as an obnoxious genius, to make his point. In fact, it's here that the film loses its audience, because it's at this very moment that the film goes from believable to unbelievable.
Of course it doesn't help that Dhruv Punjvani, the child actor playing the central role is allowed to go so wildly out of control and perform so exaggeratedly, especially in those portions where he's playing the intolerable child prodigy.
Irrfan Khan as the father who uses humour as a shield to hide his despondency, performs indifferently for the most part, as a result failing to bring a sense of realism to his role.
It's Shobana, meanwhile, who emerges the emotional anchor of this film, almost succeeding in her efforts to keep it grounded in authenticity. If Apna Asmaan doesn't quite cut it in the end, blame the slip-shod screenplay for killing what was undoubtedly a promising premise.
I'm going with one out of five for director Kaushik Roy's Apna Asmaan, it's got its heart in the right place, but that just may be the only thing that's in order here.
Rating: 1 / 5 (Poor)
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