Life Goes On review ★★

The film follows the lives of a wealthy British Asian family and aims to retell the story of King Lear in a modern context. The family are dealt a severe blow when the matriarchal figure of the household, Manju (Sharmila Tagore), dies from a shock heart attack. We witness the distant and dysfunctional family during the aftermath of this loss with Sanjay(Girish Karnad) his brother Alok (Om Puri) and Sanjay's three daughters uniting together in an attempt to comfort each other and overcome their grief.

The experienced trio of actors, Sharmila Tagore, Girish Karnad and Om Puri in particular are really engaging and gripping to watch, clearly revelling in the demanding and dramatic scenes provided for them. Whenever involved they peaked my interest. The chemistry between the three of them really flows smoothly and they are the outstanding feature of the film. Credit to the director is deserved for attaining such excellent performances. Other positives include the camerawork and lighting of the film which really made London and it's other locations look superb throughout. The use of music was expertly done but became a bit repetitive as the film progressed.

Yet even with those promising moments the film was brought down via a few really noticeable problems. Parts of the dialogue were really clunky and severely lacked subtlety with a few too many moments containing characters simply stating the obvious or informing us of their feelings. Even the excellent trio mentioned earlier struggle with certain scenes and the three daughters are passable but also have very little challenging or exciting dialogue to work with.

However I felt the weakest point of the film was concerning the many sub-plots to the story. Other than the simple family overcoming their loss plot thread we had a brief history lesson on Sanjay's past, a long chat with some of Sanjays old friends whose only purpose was simply to tell us what is wrong with British Asian relations and politics in the UK. There was also a music band who are breaking up over religious difference and a character who is worried about losing his own job amongst the economic crisis. Further more the director also worked in an unhappy marriage, a gay relationship and a romeo and juliet style love affair with an angry, disapproving father. Did you keep up with all that? I didn't. Many of these points felt arbitrary to the film, making it excessively long and losing focus on the promising storyline of the family overcoming their grief and how their mothers death brought the family back together. I can understand that the director wanted to ensure she had enough story to keep the audience interested for a feature length film but this was far too much and rather than trying to engage us with many different characters with various dilemmas it was simply too greedy. The first act worked but as the plot meandered into all these different areas, sometimes trying to tell us all the wrongs with the world, I really lost interest.