Release
date:
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December 1, 2017
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Director:
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Rajiev Dhingra
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Cast:
Language:
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Kapil Sharma, Edward Sonnenblick, Monica Gill, Ishita Dutta, Kumud Mishra,
Rajesh Sharma, Inaamulhaq, Aanjjan Srivastav, Narrator: Amitabh Bachchan
Hindi
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In a small village in 1920s
Punjab, a youth called Mangat Ram (Kapil Sharma) meets a pretty young woman
called Sargi (Ishita Dutta), when he comes visiting for a friend’s wedding. Manga,
as he is known to everyone in his own home village, is a good-hearted chap,
hard-working but unemployed. The two, of course, fall in love. Manga’s search
for a job finally ends when a British government official, Mark Daniels (Edward Sonnenblick), hires him as his Man
Friday.
While Manga and Sargi negotiate
the tricky terrain involved in a romance in a conservative society, elsewhere
in the storyline the ruler of the region, Raja Indeevar Singh (Kumud
Mishra), is plotting with Daniels to take over Sargi’s village to start a
liquor factory. As it happens, Daniels has taken a shine to the king’s
good-looking Oxford-educated daughter Shyamali (Monica Gill). India is in the
grip of Gandhiji’s call to boycott British goods, and some of the local people
led by the Gandhian village elder Lalaji (Aanjjan Srivastav) have thrown
themselves into the movement. Manga, meanwhile, has become fond of Daniels,
which has driven him to believe that not all Brits are bad. Will he be proved
wrong? Will he save his lover’s village by bringing Daniels over to their side,
or will his simplicity give way to wiliness in a battle with the powers that be?
The period setting and theme of Firangi bring to mind Ashutosh
Gowariker’s Lagaan which again
featured poor villagers taking on the might of the Empire through a clash with
a single cog in its wheel. The similarities end there. Lagaan was not flawless, but it was brilliant in the way it etched
out every single character on Bhuvan’s cricket team in delightful detail,
making each of them memorable. Firangi’s
uni-dimensional villagers merge one into the other and would have been
indistinguishable from each other if it were not for the presence of several
gifted and well-known character artistes among them, including Rajesh Sharma as
Sargi’s father and Inaamulhaq as Manga’s buddy.
Besides, this is a film of broad
brushstrokes and simplistic characterisations, as it ranges a bad rich man and
a bad gora against sweet,
golden-hearted, poor Indians. It was perhaps foolish to expect nuance from a cinematic
venture that chose as its title a disparaging Hindi word for “foreigner”. The
production quality of Firangi too is
average. And at 160 minutes, it is also just too long for a film with
such little depth.
This is not to say that it is a
complete write-off. It is not. The cast is pleasant, it has a catchy soundtrack
composed by Jatinder Shah, and even when it is indulging in clichés, it does
not scream exaggerations at us. Daniels, for instance, is a one-tone villain,
yet not of the snarling, fang-baring variety that 1970s-80s Bollywood favoured.
Kapil Sharma, whose claim to fame
is his stupendous success as a Hindi television comedian, has been cast to
break the mould here – Manga is not a comical character although he is
occasionally funny. Sharma is the producer of Firangi, so going against type is obviously a calculated career
decision on his part, and not an entirely unwise one at that. He has a
naturally likeable personality and is fair enough in the role of a rural
simpleton. Ishita Dutta is pretty, Monica Gill is strikingly attractive, and
both leave an impression.
Gill’s Shyamali, in fact, is the
only character in Firangi with some
convention-defying heft in this otherwise paper-thin film.
Edward
Sonnenblick playing the evil firangi
of the title is the only one in the cast who seems not to even try to rise
above the ordinary script. He hams his way through the entire film.
The
closing passages of Firangi are
completely predictable, except for one that throws up a surprise appearance by
a person who contemporary India sorely needs as we are being torn apart by
divisive forces. In that scene – naïve yet somehow appealing in its artlessness
– writer-director Rajiev Dhingra pulls out the Bharat Mata Ki Jai slogan and reminds us that it was not always the
disturbing weapon it has become in the hands of today’s nationalists.
Clearly
Dhingra has his heart in the right place. What he also needed to have in place
was substantive writing.
Rating
(out of five stars): *
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CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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160 minutes
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This review was also published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firangi
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