You sometimes feel a film has lost the battle even without going to war. Moksha gives us the other, even more uneasy feeling. It takes on a bigger challenge of creating a troubled but beautiful universe of important impulses and impotent desires, but it misses out on the more intimate interpersonal relations that finally make a cinematic work worth the viewers’ while.

For his long-delayed directorial debut, the painter-on-celluloid cinematographer Ashok Mehta has chosen a theme that roams freely and uncontrollably in the realm of the surreal and abstract. The film’s visual content is expectedly mesmeric. Mehta undoubtedly deserved the National Award for his riveting cinematography.

ALSO READ: Manisha Koirala Recalls Working With Vidhu Vinod Chopra On Love Story 1942 Set Lamentably the narration just doesn’t merge with the film’s exterior design. Hence we often feel as though we’re undergoing two separate experiences –visual and emotional –in one film. This schizophrenic experience somehow precludes a visceral life in the film.

We end up looking at a work that’s tediously and often pretentiously intellectualised. Arjun Rampal, in his delayed debut film, plays Vikram Sehgal, a lawyer from a well-to-do family who’s disgusted by the mercenaries who have turned the legal profession into a currency-minting business. Mehta delineates Vikram’s progressive alienation from his capitalistic environment in just a couple of sequences, where an old hapless woman(Farida .