Colorful Jaipur: A Pretty Mess of Colors

Should you watch Colorful Jaipur? If you’re the type of person who stares at spice market photos on Instagram for ten minutes, yes. If you need a plot that actually goes somewhere or characters who speak more than two sentences, you will probably be bored out of your mind in the first fifteen minutes. It’s a mood piece, plain and simple.

The whole thing feels like the director just let the camera roll while they were looking for a decent cup of chai. There’s this one shot of a stray dog sleeping in a patch of sunlight that lasts for way too long. It’s not profound. It’s just a dog. But I found myself squinting at the screen, wondering how the dust in the air looked so perfectly golden.

It reminds me a bit of the aimless, drifting energy you find in Sami sitsotskhle, where the environment does way more heavy lifting than the script ever could. Not that there is much of a script here. It’s mostly just people walking by and the sound of distant traffic.

The Good, The Dusty, The Weird

• The colors are honestly ridiculous. Whoever did the color grading must have been vibrating on a different frequency.
• The sound design is surprisingly crunchy. You can hear the gravel under people's sandals.
• There’s a weird cut where the audio just vanishes for five seconds. I thought my speakers died.
• It makes me want to visit, but also makes me feel like I’d just be in the way of everyone actually living there.

The pacing is entirely nonexistent. It starts somewhere, and it ends somewhere else, but it doesn't really travel. It just hangs out. Sometimes the camera lingers on a piece of fabric so long you start to feel like you could reach out and touch the weave. Other times, it pans away from something interesting just to look at a brick wall.

Is it a "great" film? No. It doesn't even try to be. It’s just a collection of moments that happen to look really nice together. It feels less like a movie and more like a fever dream you had after watching too many documentaries about The Iron Horse and needing a palate cleanser.

Honestly, I’m not sure I’d watch it again. But I’m not sorry I saw it. It’s just… there. Like a piece of furniture you don’t really use but keep because the color matches the curtains. ☀️