Paa
(12A) 140min
67-year-old actor Amitabh Bachchan puts on the prosthetics and reinvents himself as a 12-year-old boy in this tale of lost love and ambition. Auro suffers from a rare genetic defeat known as progeria, which makes people age so fast they look six to seven times older than they are. The device also means that his actual son Abhishek Bachan could play the legendary Indian actor’s father in the story. The convoluted plot takes a long time to get going as it’s revealed that father and son do not know of each other’s existence because gynecologist mum Vidya (Vidya Balan) decided that rather than ruin her Cambridge boyfriend’s political ambition by having a child out of wedlock, she’d have the child in secret. 12 years later Amoi is a successful politician who boasts of the fact that he has no demons in the closet, but will learn different when a chance encounter brings him in contact with his prematurely aging son. It’s only when the secret’s out that the pace picks up with 67-year-old Amitabh showing why he has legendary status as he brings his parents back together.
Out now on selected release.