Stanley ka Dabba

Not a lot of movies are made in India for children, and when they are made they either lack proper promotion, or big names, and even budgets many times. This may be the reason why we don’t have any established name in this particular genre.  However when a talented man like Amol Gupte (Creative director of Taare Zameen Par) makes a movie for children, the expectations are sky high. So does ‘Stanley ka Dabba’ deliver what it promises? The answer is a bit tricky.

The story revolves around a young school boy named Stanley, he has a lot of friends in the class, who don’t mind sharing their lunch box with Stanley, because he never brings a Tiffin with him. There is yet another man in the school who is not in a habit of bringing tiffin “the dabba”, the Hindi teacher, role played by Amol Gupte himself. Now the teacher like to eat the tiffins of other teachers and students as well, the problem starts when the other kids have to choose between Stanley or the teacher to share the lunch, as both cannot be accommodated.

It’s difficult to criticize a movie which has been largely appraised by a lot of people; but you can’t change your opinion just because it doesn’t go with the majority. However ‘Stanley ka Dabba’ is not such a bad movie that i need to go out and fight the world to prove a point. But the movie has its own problems.

The story is wafer thin, with an ok ok script. The first half drags, but the second half brings on some interesting moments. However the performance of kids is flawless, they never look like they are in a movie, and they look like kids out of daily life. There are other teachers played by known names like Divya Dutta and Raj Zusti, but their significance to the story is not much. The climax of the movie is so farfetched that it looks like a pathetic attempt on the writer’s part to create a social message kind of a thing, this part is just not acceptable on the ground of common sense.

Was it an attempt to make a movie with a message or just another trick to touch the sympathetic side of the audience is hard to tell, however a better and logical climax was possible with all certainties.

The movie is low budgeted with a lot of favourable reviews, so it won’t be difficult for the producers to recover the cost. It may have already been recovered as we talk. It’s not such a bad movie, but the climax drowned the 150 bugs I spent on the tickets.

Rating **.