Reviews/Film; American Comes of Age Amid India's Old Ways (original) (raw)
Movies|Reviews/Film; American Comes of Age Amid India's Old Ways
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Praying with Anger
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Comedy, Drama
PG-13
1h 41m
- Sept. 15, 1993
Credit...The New York Times Archives
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September 15, 1993
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Section C, Page
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"Praying With Anger" is a standard male rites-of-passage film with one fascinating difference: Dev Raman (M. Night Shyamalan), a hotheaded exchange student who endures assorted trials on his way to responsible manhood, is an American-born Indian who goes all the way to Madras to grow up.
The film, which opens today at the Village East, is the cinematic debut of Mr. Shyamalan, a 22-year-old director, who wrote and produced the movie in which he also plays the leading role. Sumptuously photographed on location in Madras, it offers a vision of contemporary life strikingly different from that shown in most films set in modern India, which tend to dwell on the mystical and the exotic.
"Praying With Anger" explores a middle-class Indian existence that is so restrictive in comparison with its American counterpart that Dev appears as the exotic, slightly dangerous interloper in a very staid milieu. Untutored in the country's middle-class ways, he is continually infringing customs and traditions that seem to him unfair, unreasonable and benighted.
The Mohans, the family with whom he stays, are an austere, tradition-bound clan whose son, Sunjay (Mike Muthu), becomes Dev's guide and best friend. The Mohans also have a daughter, Rupal (Richa Ahuja), whose determination to marry a boy from another region incurs her parents' fierce resistance. Of all the customs Dev encounters, it is the limited freedom allowed to Indian women that most disconcerts him.
Dev's stay in India turns into one long frustrating series of conflicts with the established order. During a class on Shakespeare, he discovers that in Indian colleges it is considered a gross insult for a student to question a teacher. Unaware of a hazing system known as ragging, he fights back against Raj Kahn (Arun Balachandran), a bullying upperclassman, and pays heavily for it. He conceives a hopeless crush on a beautiful classmate, Sabitha (Christabal Howie), whose family has arranged her marriage to a man she has not met.
Other experiences gradually bring Dev under the country's spell. He consults a swami who improvises a valuable parable. Visiting the childhood home of his father, a financier who has recently died and from whom he was estranged, he feels an unexpected closeness. The ultimate test of Dev's maturity comes when a riot outside the Mohans' home threatens to escalate into major bloodshed and he rashly enters the fray.
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