Gerald Wright's Movie Coverage
LITTLE ZIZOU MOVIE REVIEW
Directed by: Sooni Taraporevala
Running time: 101 minutes
Genre: Drama and Comedy
Distributor: Studio 18
MPAA Rating: Not rated
The closing night film of The Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council (MIAAC) Film Festival left everyone in the audience feeling light hearted. Sooni Taraporevala, the award winning screenwriter of The Namesake and Mississippi Masala, makes a directorial debut with this film.
This satire is about how two feuding Bombay families coming to terms. Xerxes (Janhan Bativala), "Little Zizou" as he's known, is an eleven year old soccer loving Parsi boy whose wish is that his idol Zinedine Zidane visit Bombay. Though his mother died in childbirth, Xerxes hopes that she can still see him and affect miracles from her place in heaven.
His older brother Art (Imaad Shah) is a talented artist who has a one sided love affair with the daughter of the feuding family. Her name is Zenobia (Dilshad Patel) and she has eyes for someone whom her free thinking newspaper publisher father Boman Pressvala (Boman Irani) would not approve of. The father of Xerxes and Art is Cyrus II Khodaiji (Sohrab Ardeshir) a self-proclaimed protector-of-the-faith who thrives on the attentions (and donations) of hopeful believers.
This fun loving film has many humorous interactions between the characters. The movie explodes with real fireworks when Boman writes a hard hitting story critiquing Cyrus and a public reaction breaks out. As the two households fight and the film finds a happy closure to the friction in a pleasantly predictable fashion.
This is a film the U.S. distributors should pick up, because there aren't enough good family oriented films to go around.
FILM RATING (A)
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