M Cream: Ripple-less journey for youth

Cast: Imaad Shah, Ira Dubey, Tom Alter, Barry John, Auritra Ghosh

Rated: 4/10

Film festival movies work under a certain veneer of art cinema and seldom harbour box office ambitions. They live and die in a far removed (from regular film viewers) world of applause that may not always make sense to an average cinema goer.

But modern-day young directors, this one (Agneya Singh) having directed his first at a callow age of just 22, are ambitious for a far bigger, multiplex kind of splash for cinema that’s more often vacuously affected than really meaningful, all the awards notwithstanding.

M Cream comes into that category. Serenading a journey of four youngsters, one in particular, up in the hills to ostensibly look for the mythical M Cream, a divine hash which gives a high as no other, the story instead (as expected) gets into the more grounded existential issues plaguing Generation Y.

Peeping through a haze of alcohol and drugs, flimsy relationships and a meaningless debate around more teen than adult issues (who am I, what am I, why am I), the film goes on and on without an end or a reason in mind.

Imaad Shah as the scrawny youngster of a shipping magnate fails to impress despite a charged-up effort, and the issues that the film throws up are issues we have seen better handled in other movies than this one.

For a drugs-straddling, issue-based movie, M Cream is neither too drugged nor too animated in telling its story and hence falls in a no-man’s zone.

And, by the way, M Cream is not so mythical as shown in the movie. It is a much familiar narcotics cafe delight in places like Norway where it is legal to buy drugs…. It is called Malana Cream.  

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 24 July, 2016