Stanley Ka Dabba: Watch online HD

Amole Gupte is magical with kids. And that's because he seems to be as much a psychologist as a filmmaker. After writing Taare Zameen Par, he writes and directs Stanley Ka Dabba, another heartwarming film about children just being children, with all their cares and carefree abandon. And adults just being adults, with all their idiosyncrasies, quirks and secret anguish.

Starring: Partho, Amole Gupte, Divya Dutta

Written & Directed by Amole Gupte

Rating: ******

A sparkling gem of a film, if ever there was one, Stanley Ka Dabba is the sort of rare and precious look at the world of the child as seen aeons ago in Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar or Ray’s short-film Pikoo’s Diary. Closer in time there was Taare Zameen Par with which Amole Gupte was profoundly associated.

Stanley Ka Dabba goes far deeper into the mind of the male child . This time the endeavour is not to milk the child’s deficiencies for tears. In Stanley…Gupte looks for and finds an enormously engaging and humane story in the normal tenor of a 10-year old boy’s school life.

Stanley and his friends as played by Partho and a group of absolutely unaffected children, come across as utterly normal creatures of classroom caprice. If as we have been told, these young boys are trained to face the camera, then the training doesn’t show at all.

The skill that has gone into the performances is so subtle and the artifice in their performances so minimal the boys come across as children of a lesser fraud.

The screenplay is almost Chekhovian in mood. The school premises where we meet Stanley and his friends becomes a playground for a sharp and savagely satirical power-play between the endearing and popular Stanley and his mean-minded Hindi teacher (Amole Gupte, lending a mouth-watering fluency to his part).

Around the teacher and the taught there emerges a plot that is tender and taut, slender but nonetheless resonant in its comment on what it means to be a growing child in an increasingly-competitive society.

stanley ka dabba

Gupte fills the canvas of his richly but delicately layered canvas with characters who make a strong impression in no time at all.

If the teachers appear caricatural it’s the nature of their job. Specially heartwarming is Divya Dutt as the archetypal Catholic teacher ‘Miss Rosy. ’ Playing an emphatic echo of Simi Garewal’s character in Raj Kapoor’s Mera Naam Joker Divya brings immense warm to the staffroom table.

amol gupt

It is in the way that Gupte weaves the theme of school rules into the rituals of ‘tiffin’ breaks that the storyteller’s skills surface with deviousness and delicacy. These vignettes from school life are derived from first-hand experiences in the playground of children’s minds.

The fears and insecurities of the growing child, the fierce bonding among the boys in and out of the classroom and the cordon that comes up when the youngsters’ school of solidarity is threatened by predatory instincts…Stanley Ka Dabba lays open a world of innocent and premature pains.

The beauty of Stanley Ka Dabba lies in its sheer simplicity and authenticity. The film creates a slice of life from the pages of any and every school in big and small town India where kids just want to have fun and teachers want to be the proverbial killjoys. Of course, there are exceptions, like the popular Miss Rosie (Divya Dutta) who generously sprinkles her conversations with terms of endearments and encourages every glimpse of creativity in the kids. 

 

The biggest bugbear however is Sir Babubhai Verma (Amole Gupte) who is more interested in gobbling the kids' food rather than teaching Hindi. Stanley becomes his pet peeve because he never seems to have his dabba, yet ends up having a daily feast with his friends. Why? Because he is the most popular boy in class and his friends simply adore him. Needless to say, Stanley's missing dabba becomes a metaphor for his mysterious life..*****

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