Interesting Hindi movie “All India Rank” (2023) directed by Varun Grover and starring Bodhisattva Sharma, Samta Sudiksha, Shashi Bhushan, Sheeba Chaddha, Geeta Agarwal Sharma among others.
Its a movie on the coaching factory at Kota for young aspirants to the limited number of engineering seats in the premier Indian Institutes of Technology. It dwells on the stresses on a young kid who is literally forced by his father to go to Kota to take the pre-entrance coaching so that he can crack the IIT entrance test.
The kid Bodhisattva Sharma meets other similar age kids all going through varying degrees of stress and dealing in their own manner. Among them is a smart girl Samta Sudiksha.
In the meantime the kid’s family in Lucknow is going through their life crisis with the father Shashi Bhushan having been recently suspended for a faux pas not really connected with his work and his mother having to deal with a kid at her telephone call booth making vulgar calls to random women in the locality.
The father has high hopes though the son does not deem it important. Varun Grover has beautifully developed the script taking time to build up a story. There is no loud preaching in the movie and the characters play into their roles quite beautifully. Varun has taken the guts to throw completely new actors into the movie and they have all performed admirably well.
There is no abrupt closure or happy ending, though he closes the loop in a very subtle way. This could be one of those sleeper hits of 2024. IMDB 7/10
vramonline 