A tender depiction of an innocent mind, soul yet no so well executed.

Masoom (Innocent) brings up a tale of a boy who does not know his father. The father does not know that he has a son from an extra marital affair. Now in between this Father and Son is a family whom the Father DK (Nasseruddin Shah) married. There is Shabana as mother of 2 daughters who now has either adopt him as a child or disown him.

Gulzar Saab who is extremely versatile and is great at subtleties has written this extremely competently and there is more of Gulzar in it than Shekar Kapur the director. The writing is so very nice that it merely needs a look through the eyes too convey what the scene means.

Extraction of acting from their actors which ideally is done by director, falls flat in this. Shekar Kapur for whom this was his first film did not extract enough emotions through his characters as he should have. Already two of Indias finest actors were cast as leads so most of the job was done and when it came to extraction acting from children , Shekar could not meet up with challenge. Those forced shivering or those bland expressions did not show that the boy was innocent but rather made it artificial.

This is not as great as it was told to me all through this years. The subject is beautiful but the depiction could have been far far better. Hail Gulzar for this more than Shekar Kapur.

It's better if I do not talk about technical departments for this movie as most of it were just in place as if to do their job for a salary and not passionately. Passion was missing technically for a subject that was passionately written.

Going with 3/5 for a good movie with a touching subject but the execution did not touch me so well.