Release date:
|
February 17, 2017
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Director:
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Amit Roy
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Cast:
Language:
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Amit Sadh, Taapsee
Pannu, Arsh Bajwa, Brijendra Kala
Hindi and Punjabi
|
Ironic perhaps, but
laughter is a great tool to highlight human misery. For proof of this, as we
count down to Oscars 2017, look no further than Roberto Benigni’s Best
Picture-nominated, Best Foreign Language Film-winning La Vita E Bella (Life Is Beautiful) from Oscars 1999,
a tragi-comedy about a Jewish Italian man and his little son in a Nazi
concentration camp. La Vita E Bella was
effective because it fully understood the heartbreak behind its humour and it did
not at any point trivialise the pain of its characters. It takes a genius to
walk that line.
Not that there is
any comparison between the two, but I thought of Life Is Beautiful several times as I watched writer-director Amit
Roy’s Hindi-Punjabi film Running Shaadi,
the story of a young man who starts a matrimonial website/facilitating agency
for couples whose families are opposed to their relationships. When it is not
meandering, Running Shaadi is funny
in places. Before we weigh its cinematic merits and demerits though, the film
deserves to be lambasted unequivocally for seeming to be blissfully unaware of the
catastrophic consequences that often accompany inter-community romances in
India.
Roy cannot be
accused of trivialising the issue. He simply seems not to understand it. It is
hard to say which is more inexcusable.
For a moment
though, let us discuss Running Shaadi
in a vacuum, completely removed from this particular socio-political context in
which it has been made. Amit Sadh plays the film’s Bharose, a Bihari working in
a clothing store in Punjab. The owner of the establishment relies heavily on
him for his business and often for his personal affairs too.
The old man’s
daughter – Nimmi played by Taapsee Pannu – considers Bharose a good friend,
though not the lover he clearly wants to be. At some point in the story, Bharose
decides to start runningshaadi.com. Religious differences, caste boundaries,
class divides – whatever be the objection your parents have to your union,
Bharose and his partner Cyberjeet (Arsh Bajwa) will get you married and try, if
possible, to even win over Dad, Mum and the extended parivaar.
Like these parents,
the filmmaker too is not bereft of prejudice. One of the film’s jokes is that Cyberjeet
considers a thickly bespectacled, ordinary-looking Bengali youth not good
enough for his pretty Punjabi girlfriend. She snaps at Cyber for his doubts,
telling him that her Shonkhu (Sandip Ghosh) is the most intelligent man she
knows. Predictably, the actress cast in this part has a markedly light
complexion while Ghosh is dark-skinned. Whaddyaknow! The stereotype of fair-is-beautiful-and-dark-is-ugly
meeting the stereotype of the cerebral Bengali and the good-looking Punjabi in
a film that is supposedly opposed to bias? C’mon Amit Roy! Seriously?
Once Bharose’s
business takes off, you guess of course that he too will need its services some
day. He does. The rest of the film is devoted to the hero solving his own
problem, surmounting far greater hurdles than any of his clients faced.
Sadly for Running Shaadi, it features some commendable
components. For one, it unobtrusively turns an important corner for the
portrayal of women’s reproductive rights in Indian cinema by showing a major
character opting for an abortion because she is not ready to have a baby. Yes,
that dreaded A-word, a place that last year’s Sultan feared to tread.
This passing
passage early in the film is handled with such subtlety that it raises
expectations for what is to come. Also on point is the non-caricaturish portrayal
of small-town conservatism (to be contrasted with big cities where more people
use a veneer of liberalism to camouflage their narrow-mindedness).
The initial
proceedings are sweetly believable. Too soon though, Running Shaadi begins to wander. Monotony sets in as Bharose and
Cyberjeet run through dozens of couples with nary a variation in their personal
story and nary a detail that might have made these characters worth investing
in. Familial opposition is overcome or even quelled with such ease that you
wonder if the filmmaker has ever read of murders sanctioned by khap panchayats,
the gruesome crimes that have come to be known as ‘honour killings’, the ‘love
jihad’ campaign of recent years, and other socially and politically sanctioned
brutalities.
Until this point, Running Shaadi presents itself as social
satire. Then suddenly, the film snaps its fingers and becomes an action
adventure/thriller without easing us into the change of mood – a mood that it
fails to sustain anyway. At this point, the story has shifted to Patna in Bihar
and even briefly visits Dalhousie in Himachal Pradesh. The couple at the centre
of the post-interval proceedings do face a murderous family, but a sense of urgency
is missing in the narrative. The casual treatment is exacerbated by the fact
that the narrative has drifted around too long to get here. By now it is too
late for the film.
This is a pity,
because the characters big and small in Bihar are far more interesting than the
ones in Punjab. The highlight of this portion is Brijendra Kala playing Bharose’s
uncle, a struggling filmmaker. Kala infuses his Ujjala Mamaji with a warmth and
substance that are absent in the rest of the story’s primary players. To be
fair, he is also written better than the others in the screenplay by Navjot
Gulati and Roy himself.
The film’s
cinematography and production design are not distinctive, which is surprising
since Roy was a noted cinematographer with Sarkar
and Sarkar Raj among other films to
his credit before he turned director with this one. A special mention must go though
to Manoj Yadav, Shellee, Keegan Pinto, Tanveer Ghazi and Anas Ali Khan for the earthy
colloquialisms and attractively informal tone of their engaging lyrics.
Amit Sadh has been excellent in
all his films so far, and most of all in Kai
Po Che (2013). Taapsee Pannu was utterly brilliant in last year’s Pink. Both need a better written, better
edited, better directed drama to house their talents.
While on the subject of editing… The film’s name was changed late in the day from RunningShaadi.com to Running
Shaadi following a legal dispute. I do wish the producers (among them
Shoojit Sircar, who produced Pink)
had further delayed the release to rework it instead of blurring people’s lips
and muting the “dotcom” repeatedly. Postponement may have been expensive, but the
repeated disruptions are even more so. They are irritating.
Plugging that problem would not
have saved the film though from its loose writing, unforgivably limited social
insights, feeble direction and screenplay. Running
Shaadi is a whimper.
Rating
(out of five stars): *
CBFC Rating (India):
|
UA
|
Running time:
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115 minutes
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This
article was also published on Firstpost:
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