By K.K.Aiyamma
Coffee Bloom, a movie shot in Coorg, has released today. I had an eye on this movie. From the youtube promo, I felt this movie is about a confused coffee estate labourer, trying to hit on the planter’s wife, vice-versa. Some love story angle with a plantation, 2 men and 1 women, that’s what I felt.
Reviews have just come in and I cant help, but keep chuckling…
Awfully Pretentious, writes a critic at Zee News:
The very talented Arjun Mathur struggles to portray a man struggling with inner demons. Poor guy! If only he had better lines to expresses his angst. Nothing in the narrative or the character’s attitude suggests a 13-year time passage that separates Dev from Ankita.
During her husband’s absence he grabs hold of Ankita, kisses her and urges her to leave her husband to start a life again with him and not feel guilty about it.
“Morals are flexible,” says Mathur to Sugandha Garg.
Ok then.
Hats off to the actor for making this unbelievably vain and stupid man look dignified. Mathur’s Dev Anand is a Dev with no Anand. He is a man who has forgotten to enjoy the gifts of life and Nature.He is a bloke with a capacity for immense self-deception. He has sold off his family property, a sprawling stunning coffee plantation, and now he has returned to claim the same.
Coincidentally the new owner(Mohan Kapoor, struggling to instill a semblance of mystery to his opaque character ) is now married to Dev’s sweetheart.
Rather than respect her space as a married woman, Dev crowds and growls at Anika for attention, demands that he give her marriage/property/dignity, whatever he can lay his hands on.You wish someone would tell this chap to shut up and smell the coffee.
Instead of trying so desperately to weave the landscape into a plot, the director should have made a documentary on the coffee plantations of Coorg.
For now, I am off coffee.
Shubha Shetty at Mid-Day has the following to offer:
‘Coffee Bloom’ is an excellent example of how some filmmakers end up making pretentious, self indulgent unwatchable movies in the name of independent cinema. These are the kind of films that get so taken by the whole idea of making a different film, that they forget to concentrate on little detailing or work on the characters or the script.
‘Coffee Bloom’ might have looked great as a four line story on a paper. Reminiscent of the great Devdas, it’s the story of a heart broken Dev Anand (Arjun Mathur), who was weaned away from his lady love Ankita (Garg) after a suicide pact goes wrong. Dev wants to turn into a sanyasi till his mother’s sudden death gets him to look at life from a different view. So it brings him back to Coorg to a coffee plantation, which incidentally belongs to Ankita’s boisterous husband (Kapoor). Yes, there is one more angle to this love story, a sex worker (Ishwari Bose), whose character, perhaps inspired by the legendary Chandramukhi, seemed not only utterly silly but also terribly useless.
Thanks to the uninspiring script, the ho-hum performances, dull cinematography (Coorg could have looked so much more beautiful) and lackluster dialogues, you want to grab a cup of coffee to slap yourself awake once you are done with the movie.
For Tushar Joshi/DNA, it was an Imperfect brew of drama between sketchy characters:
He writes:
Coffee Bloom doesn’t stay true to its name. It never manages to give you an adrenaline rush like the coffee, nor does it bloom into a full fledged drama. Instead it gives you a series of scenes, events, monologues and interactions between the key characters that don’t have the cohesiveness they require. Also you need a lot of patience to get through this film. Warrier doesn’t rush his characters through any situation. He lets them linger, some times long enough to get you distracted.
Uday Bhatia at LiveMint has been a bit generous while calling it – unexciting, but with a slow-burn intensity:
Coffee Bloom isn’t the most exciting of films, but it has a slow-burn intensity that owes a lot to Mathur and Garg’s carefully calibrated performances and Kapoor’s exuberant, pressure-releasing one (his enthusiasm is simultaneously irritating and endearing). Yogesh Jaani’s cinematography is perfectly pretty, but I wish the director and the cinematographer had worked out a way to inject a little visual excitement into the scenes. This is Warrier’s first feature, which might account for a couple of blind spots: too much holy-earth-karma blather on the voice-over, a bland soundtrack, touristy photography. Yet there are also moments when Coffee Bloom’s characters access deep reserves of hurt and despair, which is when the film’s bruised, beating heart is laid bare.
Sweta Kaushal from HT has also not been so scathing, while giving a 2.5 rating to the movie.
She writes:
The film has a sense of warmth that ensures the audience would not want to ditch it half-way. However, the pace is a little slow – something associated with the movies that premiere at festivals before hitting theatres.
Now it has to been seen, how the general public takes to this movie in the theatres.
