Bombay Rose


Bombay Rose is a 2019 Indian animated film written, edited, designed and directed by Gitanjali Rao. The film had its world premiere at International Critics Week at the 2019 Venice Film Festival. It was screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. The film follows the story of a flower seller falling in love. It is made by frame-by-frame painted animation in computer and took 18 months with 60 artists.

Cast

gave a positive review and said, "Bombay Rose subverts not just Bombay cinema’s storytelling, but also the implicit assumptions of Bombay cinema." Guy Lodge of Variety said that Rao's "exquisitely realized debut feature offers folk-influenced visual splendor to compensate for some jumbled storytelling." Xan Brooks from The Guardian wrote: "Bombay Rose’s high-stakes melodrama might be ripped from the real world, but it has been powdered and perfumed – crammed full of archetypes and over-egged emotions, liberally sprinkled with musical interludes."
Fionnuala Halligan of Screen International felt that the film is "at heart a dark story, yet it can also shine brightly, dealing with heartbreak and hope, a perilous life in the slums of Mumbai in which death is always close by but a big-screen Bollywood escapist ending is equally only a cinema ticket away." Gautaman Bhaskaran of Arab News said that the color palette's in the film were "may be opulent and eye-catching" but the storytelling "is weak, probably a result of poor editing and wanting to pack in too much."