Mr. and Mrs. Iyer

This is a film about people foremost and also the sad religious politics around them. The acting is very low key and perfect for the story. Humanity abounds in tense situations. I like the use of the bus to tie disparate people together in surprising ways.

How surprising there are so few reviews of this film on Amazon. The movie Mr. & Mrs. Iyer is about a Muslim man & a Hindu woman & her child who are thrown together during a bus ride to Calcutta, India that is halted by local religious riots.As a man & a woman & her infant prepare to board a bus their friends & family seeing them off introduce the man & woman to each other. The man thanks the woman's father for helping him to obtain a pass into a forest where he will be taking wildlife photographs. In return, the family, who thinks he is Hindu because his nickname is Raja, asks him to watch over their daughter, Meenakshi, & her infant as they travel alone to meet her husband. As Meenakshi struggles with her infant on the bus Raja helps her & ends up sitting next to her & eventually discloses he is Muslim. She is repelled, but when Hindu militants board the bus & interrogate the passengers to identify the Muslim men, Mrs. Iyer claims the man next to her is her husband, Mr. Iyer, in order to save his life.The development of the Raja & Meenakshi's reliance on each other &, eventually, their friendship is subtle, intelligent, & compelling. The storyline is assisted by great scenery & a nice soundtrack with no musical numbers. I expected the storyline to be more political & violent, but it centers on how a few people's opinions & prejudices can change. This is the one of the best films I have seen come out of Indian cinema & I look forward to seeing more movies like Mr. & Mrs. Iyer come out of India.If you like this movie, you may also enjoy the films Earth & Water directed by Deepa Mehta & Hey Ram directed by Kamal Hassan.

I just saw Mr and Mrs Iyer. I am a South Indian Tamil Brahmin living in the US for the past 50 years and the opening scene is extremely typical of an academically oriented but culturally close Tamil Brahmins. I have never heard of Konkan Sen Sharma and originally I thought Meenakshi was a Tamil Brahmin actress. I was really surprised to learn that Sen Sharma mastered this Tamil dialect and rendered the dialog with a perfect Tamil Brahmin Accent. She spoke English also with a Tamil Brahmin accent. Apart from that the film itself is beautifully interwoven with nuances, facial expressions and body language which I thought were extraordinary. Facial expressions and body language have much more impact than spoken words. The chemistry between Meenakshi and Raja rises from nothing to its crescendo at the end. In this respect, I have never seen in any film Indian or English such an extraordinarily realistic acting. The closest to this perfection is perhaps Ingrid Bergman. Rahul Bose gives a very self contained performance with unspoken words and serves as an excellent counterpoint to Sensharma. The story inevitably comes to the only conclusion it can come with Meenakshi with her baby Santhanam in her arms staring with wistful eyes filled with tears at the vast sea of blurred humanity in which Raja has disappeared. It reminded me of the ending of Casablanca where Rick stares at the aircraft wistfully with Ilsa and her husband Victor vanishing in the vast cloud cover.

I really love this Indian-made movie. We have been to India many times so for me it has special appeal just because it takes place in India. It is definitely an Indian movie and the people are just normal everyday Indian people doing every day normal things. A Muslim man and a Hindu woman with a baby are traveling together on a long distance bus. They strike up a casual acquaintance. However then there is a Hindu uprising and the bus is invaded by radical Hindus who have burned villages and now are seeking Muslims to kill. Our Hindu woman says the Muslim man is her husband and consequently he is not disturbed. But the area is so unsafe that a curfew is called and the bus goes no further and the man, woman and child are stranded and finally find a place to stay together in the country. And then begins a story that touches on prejudice, goodness and breaking down walls of division. It is a beautiful touching movie that is high up on my favorite list. I am moved every time that I watch it. A wonderful movie.

This film has a powerful message, but some of it definitely was lost in non-translation. Conversations between native speakers need subtitles so the whole story can be understood by English-speaking audiences. Otherwise, it was a richly textured story in a strikingly beautiful country wracked by turmoil and violence. Still, it was not as emotionally engaging as I expected.

A complex story of racial, religious, and caste differences between a couple forced together by circumstances on a bus ride across India that meets with terrorism on the small, localized scale along the way.The lead actors did amazing jobs, the material and dialogue are very compelling, and I re-watched the whole movie immediately to catch more nuances the second time around: I was so rapt the first viewing, I'm sure I missed half of the sub-context.There is very, very brief nudity and language that is largely relevant to the story line.

Great movie! Love the storyline and to watch the change of prejudices someone has toward another when they open their heart and see others for who they really are and not what others make them out to be. Need to watch to understand what I meant. Great story!

Though fictional, It somehow depicts troubled times of the India Pakistan independence. Feelings ran high and atrocities were committed on both sides. The British who milked, plundered and looted India for centuries walked away from the mess literally unscaled. The movie depicts a lighter side to those otherwise troubling times. Highly recomended.

Mr. and Mrs. Iyer ist ein sehr eindringlicher Film. Er ist zwischendurch doch recht heftig und zeigt was dort in diesem Lande nicht funktioniert. Insgesamt ist der Ablauf des Filmes aber ruhig gehalten, also nichts für Musik und Gesangs-Freunde.Einzig die Deutsche Synchronisation der Hauptdarstellerin ist eine Katastrophe. Unter anderem wirkt der Film auch deshalb manchmal etwas "Langatmig"... eine "ablesende Schlaftablette"... schrecklich....

Ich habe den Film vor einigen Jahren beim Braunschweiger Filmfest gesehen und war - ebenso wie alle anderen, die dort waren - schwer beeindruckt, ebenso später bei der Ausstrahlung im Fernsehen. Ein leiser, berührender Film, jenseits des Glamour von Bollywood; einfühlsam erzählt, großartig gefilmt und gespielt. Ein ernstes Thema, aber dennoch ein Film, der ein Lächeln auf die Lippen zaubert. Ich freue mich schon sehr auf die DVD und wünsche ihr viele Käufer!

Ein sehr schöner film ruhig gelassen bei diesem Hintergrund trotzdem spannend die beiden Schauspieler hervorragend kein typischer bollywoodFilm ich mag aber die fime sehr gerne schade das nicht mehr davon Untertitelt oder synchronisiert werden

Dieser Film ist einfach nur klasse. Er hat mich sehr berührt und ich habe ihn mittlerweile mehr als einmal gesehen.Der Film zeigt mal wieder auf, dass die Religion eigentlich völlig wurscht ist, aber leider immer wieder zum Thema wird und zu Auseinandersetzungen und sogar zu Krieg führt.Er zeigt aber auch, dass man seine Vorurteile ablegen kann.Wirklich nur zu empfehlen!

We don't buy movies here, but the media disc that contains the movie, hence please review the product that you bought rather than the movie for which you can go add to IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. Okay, the movie is undoubtedly perfect but this product is not. First of all this widescreen movie is presented in a 4:3 ratio in this DVD. Not like they have cropped the left and right sides of the movie but squeezed the 16:9 movie into a 4:3 ratio adding black bars on top and bottom. So when you watch it on your LED TV or a widescreen laptop, you see the movie as a box in the middle of the screen with big black bars all 4 sides. Of course, one can zoom, crop and manage to make it appear full screen but the movie resolution is too low at 480p and the actual size is already lower to it sucks on big screen with horizontal telecine bars - making it worse than the VCD video quality. Audio has 2 tracks, one is Dolby Digital 5.1 and the other is plain stereo which are alright for a non-remastered media. It's a common problem with most Indian movies - they don't remaster old movies for DVDs and Blu-Rays!! Now, as much as you love this movie, if you are a cinephile, this product is not for you. The worst part is that the copy I purchased would get struck at a point halfway and won't play ahead on any player or laptop. Amazon.in was cool enough to collect it back and refund me the money!