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Thursday, April 24, 2025
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BOLLYWOOD GHANCHAKKAR
EDITOR'S PICK
He is a lazy lad. And she is one helluva crazy Punjaban whose kookie cooking
drives her sullen husband up the nearest wall. Disgust on the dining-table
camouflaged in tons of table-salt, Sanju (Emraan Hashmi, pitch-perfect in his
spousal indolence) would probably have gone on tolerating his wife's appalling
culinary skills matched only by her hideous fashion sense, if only he didn't
decide to pull off one last heist that would make him and his inept cook of a
wife rich for the rest of their life.
Take-home food, here we come!
Oh, I forgot to tell you... Hashmi plays an expert lock-picker, the kind of
safe-bet who can crack safes faster than we can say 'Saif Ali Khan'.
Forgetfulness comes easily in this crazily unpredictable dark comedy about an
ordinary Delhi couple's life going unimaginably out-of-control when they decide
to mess around with two self-styled bumbling baddies, who seem to have modelled
their crime life on pirated video prints of Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino
crime flicks. Really, they suck at their job.
Every character in this out-of-the-box comedy is a bit of an ineffectual
self-important clown. In trying hard to be cool, they end up looking like fools.
And they don't even know it!
"Ghanchakkar" is a domestic comedy that gets progressively dark and
sinister. Some of the film's most riveting moments find our amnesiac hero
searching for his own identity and trying to locate the trust factor in his
marriage that is threatened by his lack of cogent memory. Director Rajkumar
Gupta is the master of straight-faced whimsy. There are no laugh-out-loud
moments in "Ghanchakkar". Its humour is the kind that hits you in
hindsight.
Characters such as Parvin Dabas keep popping up for no seeming purpose. But then
we begin to realise the plot's larger design is to tell us that there's no real
larger design in life. Very often things happen haphazardly and inexplicably
because that's the way life is.
The characters and situations in "Ghanchakkar" are neither relatable
or particularly likeable. You really don't want to run into these people even
for fun.
Many chunks of Gupta's storytelling seem excessively quirky capturing in languid
motions, the vagaries of everyday life without whipping up an over-punctuated
drama either through the background score or fancy editing patterns. Setu's
camera looks at Mumbai's middleclass with affectionate disdain, not judgmental,
but certainly not aloof either.
Some ongoing gags, like the Namit Das' character's phone-sex and the guy on the
local train returning home with vegetables for his wife who is repeatedly
intimidated by Namit Das, just don't hold together. That maybe because this is
not comic cinema as we know and acknowledge it.
Gupta creates a world high on eccentricity in the uncaring city. If the truth be
told, we've never seen anything like this film before. Gupta's third film is
wacky, whimsical, dark, scrumptious and though not as lightly humorous as your
average comedy, wonderfully innovative in the sparing use of dramatic devices,
including music.
Its sinister thrusts, especially towards the end, eat ravenously into the
comedy. This may not work for those who are comically regaled by the "Golmaal"
series or even the wacky wit of "Fukrey". The comedy in "Ghanchakkar"
is entirely reliant on the principal characters' ability to penetrate and make
sense of the squalid world of greed and acquisitiveness that they seem to
inhabit so casually.
The film's heist-quotient is substantially sustained and aggrandised by the
crackling hissing and snarling chemistry between the bold and fearless Balan and
the endearingly restrained and under-the-top Hashmi. Their mutual suspicion of
one another's marital integrity is delightfully irreverent and yet disturbingly
relevant in today's times when distrust is a dowry gift in a majority of
marriages.
In their delightful lovemaking sequence, Gupta and his astute co-writer Parvez
Shiekh turn the politics of the bedroom on its head. Hashmi appears seductively
at the bedroom door wearing the nightwear that his wife has brought him...
Underwears and condoms are shyly mentioned. What follows is funny and, er,
unforgettable.
The incidental characters - an inquisitive neighbour, an over-friendly
real-estate agent, a nosy mother/mother-in-law whom we only hear on the phone,
et al, appear unannounced. But then all said and dumped, "Ghanchakkar"
is nothing like anything we've encountered in the genre of dark comedy.
Depicting the scary, but savagely funny underbelly of the Great Indian
Middleclass' consumerist caprices, "Ghanchakkar" gives Vidya Balan
another chance after "The Dirty Picture" and "Kahaani" to
create an unorthodox heroine. You may not think much of her loud attitude to
life, but then you have to hand it to Vidya for staying constantly unpredictable
in her characterisations. Emraan Hashmi seems to instinctively grasp his
forgetful character's obstinacy and anxieties. He brings calm to the breathless
proceedings.
"Ghanchakkar" may not be every moviegoer's cup of tee-hee. But this
comedy of arrears, monstrous arrears, is quite simply one of the most unusual
comedies in...er, living memory.
Promotion of movie Ghanchakkar Stills
Vidya, Emraan Promote Ghanchakkar
Vidya and Emraan promotes film Ghanchakkar Stills
Promotion of film Ghanchakkar Stills