Release
date:
|
January 18, 2019
|
Director:
|
Sourabh
Shrivastava
|
Cast:
Language:
|
Arshad Warsi, Saurabh Shukla, Sara Loren, Fllora
Saini, Elli Avrram
Hindi
|
Some people work
for a living. Bhola marries gullible women.
Fraud Saiyaan is centred around this man who operates on the
assumption that the quickest way to a woman’s heart is to ask her to marry him.
Since he is the hero of a Hindi film, obviously his theory works. So effective
is it that women seem to be waiting at every corner simply to be hitched to
him.
When he finally
comes up against a problem, he sets out to solve it by – what else? – marrying
again.
Bhola’s accomplice
in his serial fraudulence is a fellow called Murari who seems to be a double
agent of some sort since, on the one hand, he abets the protagonist in his
crimes while on the other hand he appears to be plotting the fellow’s downfall.
Male infidelity –
not female infidelity – has been a subject of Bollywood comedies for decades
now because, well, you know how it is: men who cheat on their wives and
girlfriends are funny, while women who cheat on their spouses are social
issues, I suppose. If you don’t mind a revisitation of an age-old formula, and
your tastes lie in the direction of women being treated lightly, then on the
face of it, Fraud Saiyaan is a
project with promise. Arshad Warsi is, after all, one of the finest – even if
unfortunately undervalued – actors in the Hindi film industry, and if you loved
his team-up with Saurabh Shukla in 2013’s sleeper hit Jolly LLB, then of course their new film together is worth looking
out for. (Warsi plays Bhola and Shukla is Murari.)
The thing about Fraud Saiyaan though is that it gives
these two talented artistes little to do. Bhola’s deception is detected by one
wife, and then another, and then another, and then ... yawn ... who needs
sleeping pills? Warsi’s charm is hard to resist and his comic timing sometimes
lifts lines that do not deserve him, but there is only so much even a gifted
actor can do with a script that is running on empty.
Worse, how much
misogyny is one expected to close one’s eyes to in the name of comedy? Sure, I
get that a man who marries women at the drop of a hat and drops each wife like
a hot brick as soon as he has stolen her money will perforce be a man who has
little respect for women. The point here though is that director
Sourabh Shrivastava, writers Amal Donwaar and Sharad Tripathi themselves seem
to see these women as trivial objects. And so we are served an array of pretty
human females with tiny waistlines and bulky bosoms heaving inside tight little
low-cut sari blouses, their pallus
strategically placed just so, Bhola gets to grab them and fling them down on
beds at will, but not one of them has an interesting enough character graph to
make them memorable.
So poorly written
are the women that at one point I began to wonder whether the female actors in Fraud Saiyaan were picked by the casting
director or the props department.
Never mind the hero’s
attitude to women. The film’s own attitude to women is exemplified by the
shooting of the Chamma Chamma remix
featuring Elli Avrram in microscopic clothing, executing a series of crude
dance moves. The issue
here is not the choreography or her outfit – the issue is,
the human being in the outfit matters so little to the director that he has
chosen graceless, awkward attire for a graceless, awkward dancer who seems to
have been deemed irrelevant beyond her willingness to be semi-nude in the
scene. Avrram’s limitations as a dancer are underlined when Warsi joins her
briefly on stage – his relatively fluid movements show her up for the poor
dancer that she is. In comparison, Rajkumar Santoshi may claim to have
delivered high art via Urmila Matondkar in China
Gate where this song was originally featured.
The climax of Fraud Saiyaan reminds us of another
dictum on which many Bollywood comedies rest: men who cheat on their wives are
funny and worthy of redemption, while women who cheat are irredeemable, despicable, contemptible jerks. Warsi’s continuing career struggles may explain why he
agreed to be a part of this formulaic, dull, misogynistic rubbish, but what is worse is that Fraud
Saiyaan is a Prakash Jha Productions presentation, with the senior
producer-director’s daughter Disha Prakash Jha as one of its producers.
Seriously Jha-saab, why?
Rating (out
of five stars): 1/2
CBFC Rating (India):
|
UA
|
Running time:
|
110 minutes
|
This review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy:
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