RATING: * * 1/2

The Last Lear belongs to Amitabh Bachchan from the word go. It neither represents the creative genius of Rituparno Ghosh as a director nor does it say much about him and Utpal Dutt as writers. But what it does show is a well-etched character which when lands in the hands of Amitabh Bachchan, ends in an absolutely awe inspiring performance.

Rituparno Ghosh tells us a tale we’ve heard before. The divide between theatre and mainstream cinema, the sardonic outlook of spontaneity bound stage artists with regard to the artifice and affected performances of those that belong to the world of cinema and the quintessential quandary of a theatre artist who tries to transcend from his world of stage to the world of lights, camera, action.

The movie begins with a veteran theatre artist, rendered immobile because of the climax scene of his first and last movie, in a vintage Kolkata home. As the movie shuttles back and forth in time, the series of incidents leading to the present are built up. And what we see in the midst of all this is, a proud, almost egotistical Shakespearean stage artist Harish Mishra (Amitabh Bachchan), a director consumed with the avarice for fame (Arjun Rampal), a good soul journalist (Jisshu Sengupta), a depressed model turned actress (Preity Zinta), an idiosyncratic wife (Shefali Shah) and an innocent-victimized-by-her-lover, nurse (Divya Dutta).  

The movie is slow and lacks a storyline per say. It even fails in having a consistent thematic presence and doesn’t even show the congruence between theatre and cinema completely.

But watch the movie to see Bachchan act. He delivers lines from Shakespearean plays with much ease portraying his whimsical character to the T, making it one of the most cherished and memorable performance of his and recent times.