Girl Interrupted

You know how we never eat cake with khichdi, or chicken shashlik with aloo-chat. The way we are told not to mix drinks. In the same fashion, you should layer up your movies carefully.

Girl Interrupted followed by Breathless, very hard to swallow. It seemed so pretentious. Also the expectations were high somehow. I expected to be a revelation. It comes off as a cheap thriller. They were trying to pass Angelina and Winona as crazy people, where the fact is they look less crazy than half the people I meet everyday.

The movie revolves around the lives of few loonies living in an asylum. There is one specimen each of the commonly understood psychiatric disorders. It’s a pathetic attempt to explain the psyche of mentally disturbed. The characters caricatured. It has bits and pieces of “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest”, floating all over it. Its like a remake, there is nothing new.

It moves on cheap gimmicks. For quite some time, it builds a threatening tone of wardens and nurses trying to prove you mad. The whole world abandoning you. The second gimmick when they suddenly unravel the seemingly sane Lisa’s (Angelina Jolie) diagnoses simplified to the world. Boiled down to few statements she makes at Daisy’s apartment. And the most pathetic of it all, how Susanna shines a ray of hope and triggers the realization for all the crazy people out there that they don’t want to be like that, they want to be normal.

A movie which mocks the vagaries of mind, and shows in gaunty shades those who have lost their sanity.

But then it can be called mildly entertaining, which this subject shouldn’t be. Especially projected in this fashion. And all said, mix your movies well.