By: Ibrahim Qutab
The writer has just completed his twelve years of education and is applying to universities to continue his academic journey.
Note: This is not a review of the film. The review can be read HERE
‘Bin Roye’, a complete family movie with pure romance in it has won the hearts of people with its amazing filming and mesmerizing acting.
Bin Roye is undoubtly the first complete romantic film to come out ever since Pakistani cinema has revived. A film which solely focuses on love and presents it as something to be worshiped. We know that Bin Roye is an adaption of Farhat Ishtiaq’s novel ‘Bin Roye Ansoo’ which is just great, but the part of it which is chosen for the film or the part of it which is put in the film somewhat doesn’t give a romantic feeling. It was full of drama and it took hard for me to swallow it as a film of any other genre.
Let me clear myself on this regard that I’m not comparing Bin Roye with Bollywood’s classical Devdas but what I’m trying to tell is that with some more input and if some mistakes were not made Bin Roye could have been the film everybody remembered, like Devdas.It could have been the classical Lollywood film, it could have been the favorite of many and it could have been the film people watched over and over again. Films are not made classical but it is the response, love form the audience that makes them that and believe me numbers don’t matter here.
Walking out of the film I had only one line for everybody and that was, ‘It will be a good serial’. For me, this is the core mistake. Make a film or make a serial. Don’t make a film out of a serial. I appreciate the idea which, to my knowledge, has never been tried before but it didn’t work out. It felt like a serial was shot and parts of it were edited to make a serial. It felt like a long story was forcefully compressed to fit in the time of a film. The first half was fast, the other was a drag. Spoiler alert – I mean Irtaza (Humayun) flies to America, studies there, lives there, falls in love with Armeena and comes back to Pakistan in less than a minute. Many crucial scenes were merged and that made the first half feel like somebody fast-forwarded it. With some justice to editing a film in its true sense, I might not have noticed all this.
The dialogues were great, the acting was definitely award winning and it could be seen in that 3 minute monologue of Mahira Khan just before the interval, which I cannot forget.
I was really happy to listen the film’s album, the songs were great, all 7 of them. But I was not happy to see the frequent use of them in the film. I wanted to see the story with dialogues, I only got the story through the songs. Everything refers back to the poor deliverance of story. It was good, but not great. Or should I say as great as the filming, acting and the songs.
Some great film-makers say,all that matters in the end of a film is how good the story was and how good did they deliver it. If the story would have been perfect with such filming, MominaDuraid has set standards of filming through Bin Roye, it could have easily been the film of the decade for Pakistani Cinema.
Why Devdas? Because Bin Roye has everything Devdas had. It had romance, drama, songs, dance, family movie factor. It had forever applauding acting of some great actors with beautiful dialogues. This is why Bin Roye could have been the Devdas of Pakistan, ‘could have been’.
