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EDITOR'S PICK
Rating: ***
Somewhere on the second-half of this slightly seductive jigsaw about a one-night
scam, filmmaker Sudhir Mishra shows up as Neha Dhupia`s father who drops in to
have a chat with his sullen daughter on the way to the airport.
Little does the stoic Mishra know that daughter has two men stashed away in a
cupboard in the living room that looks consciously like a prop on a stage set.
Quirky sex comedies are allowed their moments of eccentricity.
Maybe at this point Saurabh Shukla deliberately wanted to introduce an element
of staged comedy. After all, isn`t the world a stage? Shakespeare got there
first. But hell. Shukla is panting from behind to catch Shakespeare`s comedy of
`eros` in a modern context.
Shukla, who can be quite a funny-guy on demand, has made a quirky, sometimes
crisp, sometimes placid, look-see at marriage and infidelity.
The seductively-paced work is set at a party hosted by a loud Punjabi clueless
woman, played with much gusto by Navneet Nishan, whose amiable husband Dalip
Tahil is cheating on his plump wife with the svelte seductress Neha.
In the film, Neha seems to invite more male attention than is healthy for any
girl with a respectable appetite.
Dilip isn`t alone. Vinay Pathak, playing the goofy, slightly stupid and
undiplomatic regular guy once again, is cheating on his wife Anuradha Menon, the
hilarious Veejay Lola Kutty trying hard not to be funny, and succeeding by
checking out porn on the Internet.
But our main potential philanderer is Rahul, Rajat Kapoor as suave in his
sleaziness as ever, married to the sullen Irawati Harshe who befriends Neha at a
party, gets drunk and then forgets whether he actually did anything naughty or
not.
Hangover, anyone?
One of the problems here is that everyone speaks in Hindi because ? well,
they`re part of a Hindi film when they`re characters who would be comfortable in
English. Having said this and that, the characters seem to be effortlessly
conscious of their authentic bearings. None of the performers strays from the
not-so-straight and borrowed path of betrayal, deception and infidelity.
Rahul-Mitali marriage has a twist in its tail at the end and it doesn`t shock
you. It just makes you sigh. Shukla`s direction embarks on a journey through one
night of steamy sensations. The revelations are hardly shocking, just diverting.
Stylishly cut, the material`s chic movement doesn`t quite justify the content.
But the narrative has moments that spill out the acerbity underlining urban
marriages which are at best functional and at their worst, lies told to keep up
an appearance of domestic smoothness.
The film exudes the scent of intelligence and competence. The actors all know
their jobs. Most of them have earlier been through this kind of sexual-moral
dilemma in some form or the other. The cutting edge is missing. But the
proceedings never get cumbersome.
Pritish Nandy Communications' (PNC) latest outing "Raat Gayi Baat Gayi" has been nominated in two categories at the upcoming 16th Annual Star Screen Awards. Read More
3 couples. An 8 year old marriage and a 1 night stand to end all others. Pritish Nandy Communications presents a Rajat Kapoor production of the year’s most outrageously funny comedy that starts with a night of questions and ends up in bed with zero answers!
Raat Gayi Baat Gayi catches Rahul (Rajat Kapoor) waking up on a very heavily hung-over morning with his wife Mitali’s (Iravati Harshe) constant cribbing. Whilst her voice crashes through his head he remembers snatches of a conversation he had the previous night, at a party, with a stunning young woman, Sophia (Neha Dhupia). As he blinks through his thoughts he stumbles on the fact that one thing led to another and Sophia and he got drunk, talked a lot and finally ended up in bed making crazy love to each other—or did they? The end of the night remains hazy.
What’s worse is that Mitali just can’t seem to keep it together around him—she’s livid, she’s upset, she’s not telling him why—all rolled into one and Rahul keeps thinking back to the previous night and wondering if she caught a whiff of what happened the previous night with Sophia.
As Rahul chases his night for answers, his friends Saxena (Dalip Tahil) and Amit (Vinay Pathak) are suffering through their own marital crises! This one’s an outlandish comedy from the team of Bheja Fry that promises no dull moments!