Percy (film)
Percy ( Gujarati પરસી Parasi ) is an Indian film by Pervez Merwanji from the year 1989. It is set in Bombay in the community of Parsis .
action
The somewhat clumsy bachelor Percy Bhathena is 27 years old and lives with his mother in a residential area of the Parsi middle class. He works as an office worker in a small Unani drug store, where he is bullied by a Marathy colleague. His mother goes from house to house selling homemade sweets and pickles .
Percy finds out from his childhood sweetheart Vera that she is getting married. From that moment on, his thoughts drift again and again into the past, into his childhood. He reflects on his childhood with the quarreling scenes of his religious mother and the pleasure-loving, westernized father, his drowned friend Dara and playing games with his childhood friend Vera.
After Percy could prove embezzlement of his colleague to the business operator of the drug trade, he was fired.
The discovery of his father's old gramophone and the music of Swan Lake awaken Percy's memory of his father's sudden death. With the music he imagines dancing with the adult Vera, he even buys a dance guide for his imaginary dance exercises. Attending Vera's wedding party with his mother makes Percy feel moody regardless of the good food.
Percy finds solace in his loneliness in a music society in his Parish community, which meets regularly to listen to records with Western classical music. Percy learns Edvard Grieg's piano concerto a . a. know. On his way home after one of the music evenings, Percy is beaten up on the street by the ex-colleague who was shot and his friends. The next day he found out that the drug trade had been arson and suddenly found out of work and income. He takes over his mother's sales tour, but he can't get rid of anything. Without a goal and as if to numb, he wasted his time in the streets of Bombay and ended up in the music society. There he experiences his childhood friend Dara as a grown man in a vision , who urgently advises him not to waste his life and to seize the opportunities.
The next day, Percy goes unsuccessfully on a job hunt and his mother breaks down on her sales spree. Desperate Percy is left alone with the death of his mother.
background
Percy remained the only feature film made by documentary and television director Pervez Merwanji, who died two years after production. Several well-known actors from the Bombay Parse Theater appear in the film and he uses the self-irony typical of Parse theater plays. The film is based on the short story of the same name by Cyrus Mistry from 1976.
Awards
The film was named best film in Gujarati at the 37th National Film Awards . At the Mannheim International Film Festival 1990 Pervez Merwanji received the prize for the promotion of intercultural dialogue for Percy .
Reviews
“The film jumps back and forth between his [Percys] experiences and his dreams and fantasies. The two levels of reality are mainly separated and pushed into each other by Contractor's masterful camera work. "
literature
- Percy . In: Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Paul Willemen: Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema. , Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999 revised edition, ISBN 0-85170-669-X , p. 492.
Web links
- Percy in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Playing time according to NFDC-DVD
- ^ Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Paul Willemen: Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema. , 1999, p. 492.
- ↑ Om Prakash Dwivedi, Lisa Lau: Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market . Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ MARCHIVUM: Chronicle star . October 13, 1990, Retrieved May 4, 2019 .
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated February 24, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
