Photograph is Ritesh’s second film set in Mumbai and once again, the director

captures the grimy beauty of the city.

Ritesh Batra wrote the screenplay for his well-received 2013 feature debut, “The
Lunchbox” — a bittersweet epistolary romance between a lonely housewife and a
widowed accountant. Batra tells another Mumbai story about two unlikely
strangers who are linked by a strange quirk of fate. Photograph is Ritesh’s second
film set in Mumbai and once again, the director captures the grimy beauty of the
city.

Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is a photographer at the Gateway of India; a migrant

from a small village in Uttar Pradesh, who sleeps in a cramped room with four
other men. Miloni (Sanya Malhotra) is a brilliant student preparing for her CA
finals. She belongs to an upper middle class Gujarati family in Mumbai. Both are
what you might describe as ‘lonely souls’; they’re surrounded by people, yet lost in
a crowd.

Rafi whose comically overbearing grandmother is pressuring him to get married.

After taking a photo of Miloni he convinces her to pose as his fiancee to appease
his grandmother.
Predictably, the two develop a romance that is met with the usual roadblocks of
social status and other various pitfalls. It's a somewhat gimmicky premise, from
which Batra builds his love story. It's elevated by the couples very different
backgrounds which gives Batra the opportunity to comment on India's classism.

Rafi and Miloni come from different worldsThey are separated by class, education,
religion, even skin color. She is a fair, attractive girl from a conservative Gujarati
middle-class family. She’s also a brilliant student whose face is on the posters of
her chartered accounting coaching class. He is an uneducated Muslim man who
works as a photographer at the Gateway of India and lives a hard-scrabble life.
Sanya Malhotra is superb in the role, boxed in by her own hesitation, softly and
inwardly holding her own alongside the striking Geetanjali Kulkarni, who plays an
observant maid. Their scenes together are a thing of beauty. Nawazuddin Siddiqui
is fine as the taciturn Rafi, but slips into his default mannerisms, not digging deep
enough into his bag of tricks to create someone truly remarkable.

Batra have overcooked his response to Bollywood's bombastic cliches by giving

us a film so contemplative and agonisingly restrained that it will try your patience.

The music is terribly monotonous, often ill-matched with the situation and mood.
The basics of screenplay writing say that every story must have a beginning,
middle and end. This one has none, and the open “end” is so sudden and
mysterious it is as if the notebook in which Batra was writing the script got to the
last page and he decided to call it quits to this humdrum, tiring and sleep-inducing
drama without head, tail or spine.

Photograph doesn’t come together as beautifully as The Lunchbox did. The

screenplay isn’t as sharp or insightful. In places the film is so quiet that it feels
inert. Photograph isn’t a perfect shot and is lured by exquisite nothingness but
it’s intriguing and takes you back in time. Like love and life, it’s uncertain
and hopeful.