Juonikuvaukset(1)
British Pakistani rapper Zed (Riz Ahmed) is a rising star on the cusp of his first world tour. But, struck down by an illness that threatens to derail his big break, he's forced to confront his past, his family and the uncertainty of his legacy. (British Film Institute (BFI))
Arvostelut (2)
The content promised a different film than the one I eventually saw. Mogul Mowgli is not a film about searching for one's roots, nor is it a film about a creative crisis. It is primarily a film about a personal crisis resulting from a serious illness that unexpectedly sidelines the main character and his pursuit of his dreams. The world of rappers has always been self-centered - even more so than with other music stars and superstars - and Bassam Tariq fulfills this truth to a great extent. Zed is bitter and frightened, and that greatly affects the atmosphere of the film. The concept promised huge possibilities for depicting generational conflicts within immigrant communities, where there is a huge difference between the thinking of the first and second generations of immigrants, with children experiencing a much greater crisis of identity than their parents trapped in the memories and isolation of their own community. There were also many possibilities for conflict between the feelings of dynamically growing minorities and the majority society. The viewer could have been initiated into endless cultural wars. However, all of this appears in the film only to a small extent, more on the periphery in hallucinatory scenes that, by the way, resonate the most throughout the whole drama. I also found there to be a lack of dark humor. It would have been interesting to follow a Pakistani clan with lots of uncles, aunts, and countless cousins, a world that is infinitely distant from us. Instead, we witness Zed's wallowing in his own pains. It's not that I don't understand him, a similar degenerative disease has been developing in me in a somewhat different form for several years, but with each passing minute the film satisfied me less and less, and in the last 10 minutes, when it should have reached its climax and which are usually the most crucial for the viewer's impression, I lost touch with Tariq's film. So for me, it only deserves 2 stars, although very strong ones. I have no complaints about the acting and I consider Riz Ahmed a remarkable discovery since Nightcrawler, and even though I didn't completely connect with Tariq this time, I definitely do not underestimate him either. He proves his talent enough in his debut feature film. Overall impression: 45%.
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Mogul Mowgli is an acting tour de force by Riz Ahmed, who apart from rapping also handles dramatic film roles. The film deals with several themes – family relationships, finding one’s roots and coming to terms with one’s past, confronting health issues – which it mostly succeeds in doing. The story is purposefully interspersed with dream sequences that keep the viewer from knowing what is real and what is not, what is a memory and what is merely a figment of the imagination. The Zed-father storyline caught my attention the most because it had the strongest and most emotional charge.
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