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***
A whiff of fresh air!
In the stifling scenario of Television, where every different idea just ends up finally drowning in clichés, stereotypes and unabashed melodrama – Aapki Antara is, indeed, a whiff of fresh draught. It deals with a ‘special’ child and is totally shorn of that over-the-top postured acting and those bizarre angles with freaky lighting that is often resorted to, for depicting such themes.
The title plate, itself, hooks you to it. Just as you see Aapki written in Hindi with the wrong Maatra, it catches your imagination because of its being so cutesy and at the same time, in a strange way, gives you kind of a foreboding of something having gone wrong.
It’s the story of Antara, a little girl who is autistic. And that, in itself, is a danger bell because it could easily go haywire in terms of making, which is how such themes are generally destined – shall we say, doomed to.
In that respect, you could have the girl convulsing, fretting and fuming and those around her having the fun of their lives sniggering and sneering at her movements. Nothing of the sort happens here.
Yes – the girl does find herself to be a misfit and those surrounding her have all sorts of negative notions about her – yet, it all is done in a soft, quiet way that makes it far more poignant than those overblown melodramas that actually would turn autism into a circus:
The whole approach here is a well-researched and analytical one, even at the risk of looking or sounding like a documentary. But that risk becomes redundant as the emotional quotient of Aapki Antara never dries up.
The girl, besides being autistic, also has the misfortune of being an illegitimate child, whose mother dies in the first episode, itself. Circumstances unite Antara with her biological father Aditya (Darshan Pandya), who is now married to Vidya (Prabhleen Sandhu) and has a son from her.
When Aditya brings Antara home, the ‘Masoom’-like situation becomes all the more upsetting because of the girl being a ‘special’ child. Vidya finds out Antara’s illegitimacy being linked to Aditya and turmoil starts boiling under the roof of their hitherto happy home.
NOTE: for full review read GR8! August 09 issue.... |
