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Release date:
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July 3, 2015
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Director:
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Subhash Kapoor
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Cast:
Language:
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Arshad Warsi, Amit Sadh, Aditi
Rao Hydari, Ronit Roy, Rajeev Gupta, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Amit Sial,
Brijendra Kala, Sree Swara Dubey, Achint Kaur
Hindi
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Last
week’s release Miss Tanakpur Haazir Ho
struggled to tell a serious story through the medium of comedy. The director of
that film would be well advised to watch Guddu
Rangeela. This week’s big release is a satirical thriller and consequently a
roller-coaster of sorts, swinging from laughter to tears to hope to laughter to
heartbreak to seething rage and then back to laughter again, unobjectionable
for the most part, and largely staying focused on its central theme: the
stranglehold that khap panchayats have on rural societies and state-level
politics in Haryana.
For
that feat alone it is worth watching.
That’s
not all. Among the other reasons that make Guddu
Rangeela supremely watchable, there is Arshad Warsi, an actor so charming,
so likeable and so natural before the camera that his mere presence on screen
is worth the price of a ticket even for a bad film (which this one is not).
Arshad
here plays a small-time singer whose stage shows are a front for his work as a
small-time crook. Rangeela’s partner in crime is his much younger brother Guddu
(Amit Sadh). Their bête noir is the local politician Billu Pehelwan (Ronit
Roy). The three get embroiled in a kidnapping that involves a teacher called
Baby (Aditi Rao Hydari), a goon called Gora Bangali (Dibyendu Bhattacharya) and the
caretaker of a bungalow in Shimla (Brijendra Kala).
Director Subhash Kapoor is
credited with Guddu
Rangeela’s story, screenplay and dialogues.
He has a smooth storytelling style. Satire is his MO as we already know from Phas Gaye Re Obama and Jolly LLB. And he has a feel for the
real India, which was most evident in Jolly LLB’s small-town courtroom shorn of all the glamour, bombast and cliched
posturing that mainstream Bollywood has lent to the Indian judiciary. There was
no “dhaai kilo ka haath” in sight
there; only fumbling lawyers, a judge who would not stop eating and Arshad’s
warm smile.
If only Subhash had stuck to his
strengths – humour and realism – Guddu
Rangeela would have been a flawlessly smooth ride. Sadly, he occasionally dilutes
the film’s impact with elements that don’t fit the overall tone. For instance,
the two romantic songs thrust into the proceedings, one per woman in the lead
cast as if that’s a mandatory requirement. I’m not campaigning here for a
songless Bollywood, but for songs suited to the narrative, like the hilarious “mowdern”
bhajan Maata ka email that Rangeela
sings at the start and the delightfully kitschy title track.
The
humour in Guddu Rangeela is harmless,
with one exception. It
is unlikely that if a woman in the film had been raped, we would have been
given a scene featuring her friends laughing at her wounded vagina. Why then is
it okay to make a joke about a man who has been similarly violated? I
understand what the director was trying to do there – he was showing us friends
trying to lighten the mood around a man in agony. It might have been a good
idea to devote more thought to that situation though, considering that the real
world too tends to react with amusement when confronted with the reality of
sexual assault on men. That scene is a marked contrast to the inoffensive
nature of the rest of the film about which the worst thing that can be said is
that it ends with a sexist joke about ghosts and wives
already publicised in a trailer.
It’s also hard to understand the
compulsion to serve up a love story whenever a woman is around. It’s as if a female presence must be
justified with a romantic angle. The liaison between Guddu and Baby here is
incongruous and contrived, since there’s little chemistry between them, they
barely speak, they have nothing in common and nothing can explain the ‘relationship’
that blossoms apart from an assumption some people seem to make that when a
physically attractive human male and female are in the same frame, lowwwe is
inevitable. Fact: it is not.
Far more interesting is the
chemistry between Arshad and Amit. Rangeela and Guddu are sweetly in sync and
well-suited to the older man-younger man bonding at the heart of the story.
The two of them and other motifs
scattered through the film are deliberately designed to be reminiscent of Jai
and Veeru in Sholay. The motorbike
with the sidecar, the background score and the long-drawn-out climactic aerial
shot of the dustbowl that is the Haryana countryside – it’s both amusing and
endearing to see the film maker’s ode to one of the greatest Indian gangster
films ever made, considering the contrasting tenor of the two films.
A
word here about Amit... No actually he merits a paragraph. In a journey that has
included TV, the small part a journalist in Maximum
(2011) and one of the leads in Kai Po Che
(2013), this young actor has displayed potential worth watching out for. In the
mildly crude, buffoonish Guddu, it is impossible to spot the sedate Omi from Kai Po Che. Here’s looking at you, kid!
The
scene-stealer among the supporting cast is Rajeev Gupta who was so impactful
in tiny roles in the Saheb Biwi aur Gangster films that it’s hard to understand why we don’t see more of him in
Bollywood. Ditto for Sree Swara Dubey whose charisma was memorable in a brief
appearance in D-Day (2013). She is
noticeable here even in a fleeting role. He is a hoot as the corrupt cop Gulab
Singh, delivering the world’s funniest Antakshari scene in partnership with
Amit.
Aditi
Rao Hydari is the only one who looks lost. Brijendra Kala delivers a pleasant
change from the comical bit part player he has been in too many films. And
Ronit Roy is suitably menacing.
For
the most part then, Guddu Rangeela remains
engaging because of the balancing act it achieves between its grim subject and
its light touch. It also repeatedly throws up twists when you are not looking
for any. This continues until the plot becomes a stretch towards the end, right
from the point when a woman delivers a feminist sermon to a murderous panchayat
– so believable, na? Then it turns out that Guddu and Rangeela’s seemingly grand
scheme to corner Billu Pehelwan had feet of clay. And oh yes, their accomplices
turn up to support them in a shootout in the end, but we get no inkling of how
they figured out where the two would be.
All complaints about Guddu Rangeela though are overshadowed by
what’s worth recommending in it. Even when the film flounders, Arshad and Amit
remain immensely watchable. Rangeela and Guddu never fail to elicit laughs or tug
at the heart strings although, as the title track tells us, “Dono pakke ddheet hain / Aansu peete neat hain…” Such likeable rascals, those
two!
Rating (out of five): **3/4
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CBFC Rating (India):
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U/A
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Running time:
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124 minutes
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