I’ve been want­ing to watch Being Cyrus and finally caught it this week. An inter­est­ing movie. Shot in a style we’re not very used to see­ing in this indus­try, Ada­ja­nia deserves a few cheers for com­ing up with a film, that if not totally cap­ti­vat­ing, has enough to keep you involved. 

The fact that the fam­ily is Parsi, is quite inci­den­tal. It could have been any dys­func­tional fam­ily and don’t we have enough of them! Aquadreamer turned around halfway and asked, “So why is the movie called Being Cyrus when it’s all about the Sethna fam­ily.” The end tries to reveal why.

The cast boasts of some of our finest actors. This includes Naseerud­din Shah, who is spaced out all the time, and puts on a great Parsi accent. His wife Dim­ple Kapa­dia (Katy), who lives a mun­dane life she is not totally happy with. Her hus­band frus­trates her and she longs for a bet­ter life and schemes to make it hap­pen. If you thought it would be dif­fi­cult for Dim­ple to look ‘unglam­orous’ you have to watch this one! 

Boman Irani doing a hyper Parsi imper­son­ation and is quite a riot with his pro­nounced accent and eccen­tric­i­ties. And not to for­get the chain-smoking sur­prise ele­ment Simone Singh. And of course, the father with his vacant expres­sions is to die for! Saif Ali Khan is sur­pris­ingly good. 

It’s dif­fi­cult to fig­ure out what the movie is in the first half : romance, thriller, drama? It’s only in the sec­ond half that you don’t really care since the story seems to be mov­ing along just fine. With some tight edit­ing Ada­ja­nia keeps the plot well within his control. 

The flash­backs about Cyrus and his sis­ter being in fos­ter homes all along were I thought a lit­tle mis­placed. I know the intent was to prob­a­bly try and con­nect what hap­pened in his child­hood to his behav­iour later, but it didn’t seem too con­vinc­ing. Why need jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for mur­der when you’re mak­ing a ‘black’ film?! 

When the two bawas, Irani and his neigh­bour (whose dog keeps reliev­ing him­self on Irani’s car tyres) fight with each other, the gaalis sound really choicy and you rather wish you knew Parsi. And under­stand why they wouldn’t want to trans­late what they’re saying!

A decen­tish movie, that tries to move out of the typ­i­cal mould and tell a story dif­fer­ently. Worth a watch and I’d give it around a 6/10. 

This is Adajania’s first film and he has ear­lier been a free­lance travel writer and pho­tog­ra­pher as well as a scuba div­ing instruc­tor. That’s just some inspi­ra­tion in case you’re plan­ning to chuck your day job and get into movie-making.

What­ever it is you think of the movie, the premise (who you let in, can change your life) is sure to stay with you!