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Saturday, October 12, 2024
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BOLLYWOOD CHASHME BUDDOOR
EDITOR'S PICK
`Chashme
Baddoor` - Dum hai, Boss! (IANS Movie Review)
Rating: ***1/2
"Dum hai, Boss!" - the perky young Miss Congeniality in David Dhawan`s
"Chashme Baddoor", a far cry from the shastriya sangeet trainee tutti
fruti-eating Deepti Naval in Sai Paranjpye`s film, exclaims whenever she is
impressed by her loverboy`s dialogue-baazi.
Exclamation marks are the only punctuations in this seamless comedy of courtship
played at an impossibly high octave, without getting shrill.
`Farce` things first. Barring the core theme of two friends maliciously nipping
the third friend`s romance in the bud, and some mischievous sequences and
characters from the original, which have been entirely re-interpreted as `swines
of the times`, Dhawan`s "Chashme Baddoor" is far(ce) removed from
Paranjpye`s original.
Those were days of relative innocence. Whistling at girls at bus stops, chasing
unwilling girls to their homes, and landing up at their doorstep under assumed
identities were all considered innocuous bachelor bacchanalia. In Paranjpye`s
"Chashme Buddoor", it was a big deal that Rakesh Bedi managed to get
into Deepti Naval`s bathroom pretending to be a plumber.
In Dhawan`s film, the very gifted Divyendu Sharma, who plays Bedi`s part, just
can`t pretend to know the perky girl next-door intimately by her bathroom decor.
He manages to take a picture of a tattoo on her waist to convince his
love-smitten pal Sid (Ali Zafar) that the girl is... well, not chaste but quite
a `chalu cheez`.
While the writing gets `chalu`, it miraculously steers clear of being cheesy by
a wide margin. Under the veneer of vicious courtship games played by two
desperately single guys, Dhawan`s "Chashme Baddoor" retains a core of
innocence. A tongue-in-cheek virtuosity remains the film`s greatest triumph.
Sajid-Farhad`s writing is wild, naughty and witty, but never vulgar. The
whimsical word-play flows from a tap-dance of prankish internet-styled banter
which is border-line silly but nonetheless very engaging in an off-handedly
smart way.
If anything, the repartees flow much too furiously. From Anupam Kher`s
slap-happy mother Bharati Achrekar (effortly replacing Leela Mishra from the
original) to Goan cafe owner Rishi Kapoor`s unidentifiable assistant - everyone
is a certifiable quipster in the new film.
Among the three protagonists, Divyendu, playing an awful self-styled shaayar,
gets the most tawdry lines of bumper-sticker wisdom, which the actor delivers
with such punctuated panache, we can`t help guffawing out our implicit `irshaad`.
Comic timing is of vital importance to this film. And every actor gets it right,
dead-on sometime dead-pan. To me, the film`s most natural-born scenestealer is
the southern star Siddharth. Seen lately in Deepa Mehta`s "Midnight`s
Children", Siddharth nails his character`s filmy flamboyance. Many would
say Siddharth has gone over the top. But to sustain that high-pitched level of
crazy energy throughout the film is no laughing matter.
Or, on second thoughts, this talented actor`s performance is indeed a laughing
matter.
Ali Zafar is far more sober and controlled than his co-stars. It takes some
doing to remain steadfast in your stipulated sobriety while all your co-stars
pull out all stops.
The laughs, so refreshingly liberated of lewdness flow almost non-stop. Adding a
dollop of spice to the original script is an entirely unscheduled love angle
between Rishi Kapoor and Lilette Dubey. Lallan Miya (Saeed Jaffrey), who played
Rishi`s character in Paranjpye`s film would have loved that. Outstanding both,
Kapoor and Dubey make their onscreen romance look warm, cuddlesome and credible.
Audaciously, Dhawan and his writer Sajid-Farhad have transferred the celebrated
`chamko` detergent demonstration-sequence between Farooque Sheikh and Deepti
Naval in Sai Paranjpye`s film to the Rishi-Lilette characters. Maybe the writers
saw this pair`s chemistry to be more frothy and foamy than the central romance?
Ali Zafar`s courtship of the vivacious Taapsee Pannu is relatively `thanda`. One
reason for their frosty compatibility is Ali Zafar`s reined-in performance. He
deliberately plays his part a few octaves lower than his loud co-stars who are
so hyper-strung that you sometimes wonder which drugs they are on.
This "Chashme Baddoor" moves wickedly at its own volition creating a
crazy pattern of comic chaos that stops short of being anarchic due to the
finely-tuned situational satire simulated in the writing out of a material that
was created 30 years ago when there were no mobile phones and the height of male
voyeurism was the Playboy magazine.
Dhawan`s film doesn`t take the characters` contemporary courtship games into
areas that would offend the moralists. He knows where to stop.
Just when my faith in remakes had been shaken by "Himmatwala" last
week, David Dhawan had me shaking with laughter this week.
Carry on, Mr. Dhawan. David Dhawan`s new-age interpretation of the 1981 film
moves far away from the original creating for itself a new pathway of laughter
and hilarity without showing any disrespect to the source material.
Ali, Divyendu and Siddharth`s audacious antics, with Rishi Kapoor and Lilette
Dubey`s age-defying romance thrown in for added measure, make the trio of
girl-crazy heroes in Paranjpye`s film look like angels. This is David Dhawan`s
wickedest comedy of one-upmanship since "Mujhse Shaadi Karogi". You
can`t miss it. The attention-grabbing chest-thumping gibberish-spewing rowdy
boyz won`t let you.
Dum hai, Boss!
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