Review: LIFE GOES ON - Not As Clever As It Thinks It Is

By Matt Conn / July 1, 2011

rating: 2

With all it's admirable ambitions it is a pity that writer director Sangeeta Datta's first feature film too often fails to deal convincingly with difficult issues. Life Goes On follows a wealthy doctor, Sanjay (Girish Karnand) trying to come to terms with the sudden loss of his wife. As he and his daughters are thrown together for the days leading up to the funeral, Sanjay must face up to his past, and it's present consequences, and try to establish new relationships with his daughters who he finds he knows little about. While the director cites influences as far ranging as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh to the melodrama of Bollywood, the film ends up feeling neither especially realistic nor excitingly histrionic. It never really gets further than the skin of either minority life or the city where it is set. While Indian culture seems to consist mainly of cricket and saris, a picture postcard London of Piccadilly Circus, Embankment station, Parliament and quaint pubs serving London Pride serves as a completely bland backdrop. It is strange for a film which is meant to be about a family whose problems mirror those of the city itself, that the film gives no greater sense of richness or diversity than a tube map. Girish Karnand as Sanjay does his best as the patriarch who must suddenly come to terms with the absence of his soul mate and his entire world view coming crashing round his ears while Om Puri as Alok is perhaps the stand out bringing vulnerability and charisma to a tricky role. The three daughters are less convincing. There are far too many bum notes in their performances although they are not helped by a script which requires it's characters to flag up the particular point of controversy that might be relevant at that moment. Part of the problem is that the three girls are full to bursting with gender, social, cultural, religious or political issues in a way which feels entirely contrived: Dia we find out is pregnant with her Muslim boyfriend, Lolita has given up her career to care for a young child while her husband is constantly at work in the city trying to save his job from the recession while the third, Tulika, a lesbian and up and coming sports reporter trying to break the €œglass ceiling€ of her industry. The girls are so completely defined by the film's social and political pretension that they represent that they cease to become at all believable. More problematic still is the arrogance, or at least ill-judged, way in which issues are €œdealt€ with. In one scene the radicalisation of Islam is solved by in two minutes by Dia's Muslim boyfriend, Imtiaz, telling his impressionable friend that he has been €œbrainwashed€ and to look inside his heart for the answer. An answer so easy you wonder why no one has thought of it before. Another particularly strange subplot involves the husband of one of the girls struggling to keep his job in the city being brought to task by wife for not spending enough time at home with his family and for forcing her to drop her career to look after the child. The complex and incredibly difficult problems surrounding this are all solved in an instant as, although the husband ends up losing his job, it turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to him because he can spend more time with his family. Hang on a second, so now they have no income to support their child but it's the best thing that ever happened to them? This maybe fine if your father owns a five million pound mansion but for anyone who has been in that terrible situation the way the film seems to think it has stumbled on some universal profundity is almost offensive. I really wanted to like Life Goes On because it's a film with ideas, but by biting off more than it can chew it ends up saying very little, and more worrying still, skimming over it's subject matter in a way which is both utterly flimsy and at times, faintly ridiculous. A film like Chris Morris' Four Lions deals far better with these very difficult cultural issues by highlighting their absurdities and refusing to offer easy solutions. Life Goes On is on limited U.K. release from today.