|
Release
date:
|
September 6, 2019
|
|
Director:
|
Nitesh Tiwari
|
|
Cast:
Language:
|
Sushant Singh
Rajput, Shraddha Kapoor, Varun Sharma, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Naveen Polishetty,
Tushar Pandey, Saharsh Kumar Shukla, Prateik Babbar
Hindi
|
A present-day tragedy sends
Annirudh Pathak (Sushant Singh Rajput) off in search of his best buddies from
his youth. They were all students at India’s most prestigious engineering
college about two decades back when they joined forces to get rid of the loser
tag slapped on their hostel by the rest of the institution.
Anni gathers his gang – now older
and many of them balding – around his son to recount their shenanigans from
back then and convince the boy that winning is not everything, that the fight
counts. At first Anni’s ex-wife Maya (Shraddha Kapoor), who was also their
collegemate, is cynical about this strategy to lift the child’s spirits. She
changes her mind though as the group gets deeper and deeper into their story
and their young listener begins to get involved with these characters, some of who
once went by the names Sexa, Acid, Mummy and Bevda.
Writer-director Nitesh Tiwari had
his heart in the right place when he conceptualised this project. Chhichhore (The Childish Lot) is about
an India that teaches youngsters to slog, compete and celebrate victory but
almost never counsels them on how to handle defeat. It is a lesson that this
country and its blinkered education system, pushy parents and mindless teachers
sorely require. It is a lesson that sensible parents and forward-thinking
teachers have long tried to propagate. The vehicle for this messaging needed to
be less shaky though.
From the word go, Chhichhore’s 3 Idiots hangover is evident. That 2009 blockbuster by Raju Hirani
was not without flaws – its take on education was simplistic and
one-dimensional, it cast men in their late 30s and mid 40s as teenagers, and it
trivialised rape in that horrid “balatkaar”
speech. For the most part though, its humour was not insensitive, and one thing
is for sure: 3 Idiots had its own
voice. Chhichhore is a film in search
of a voice that ends up looking, feeling and sounding all mixed up.
Too much about this film is
uneven and confusing. For a start, how come the boys have aged when we meet
them in the present day but Maya has not? The only change in her is that her
attire and styling are less sassy and flouncy. From Western dresses and short
hair the older Maya has switched to staid cotton saris, salwar suits and a
boring bun. But her skin, hair, posture and gait remain unchanged. It is as if
Team Chhichhore felt that unlike men,
ageing women are not worthy of screen space.
Even Maya’s wardrobe and style in
college are inexplicable. She has the appearance of a girl from a much earlier
era than her male collegemates, perhaps the 1960s.
Not that the men fare much better
in their senior avatar. With the years added to their lives, their hairlines
recede but several of them continue to have skin as supple as a baby’s bottom.
These might have been excusable
glitches if Chhichhore had got its
tone right, but unfortunately the narrative never quite settles into doing its
own thing. Both thematically and tonally, the film is trying to be what it is
not throughout, borrowing heavily from 3
Idiots in terms of mood and even plot points. And the back and forth
switches between the present and the past are just not effective.
What works in Chhichhore are the sports contests which
do have an air of suspense about them, a considerable part of the banter
between the friends in their younger days, and the energetic songs Control and Fikar Not (music: Pritam, lyrics: Amitabh Bhattacharya).
Nitesh Tiwari clearly has a
talent for setting up battles in the sporting arena – he proved that in his
last film, Dangal, and proves it
again here. The many matches in Chhichhore,
the boys’ hilarious immaturity and sharp tongues are often thoroughly
entertaining. And while Maya remains a shadow in the background of the
narrative that is anyway largely bereft of women, it is nice to see a Hindi
film set in an environment where gender segregation is the norm but the hero’s
wooing of the heroine is not noxious and stalkerish.
None of this is, however, enough
to sustain Chhichhore. There are too
many draggy patches in between, the acting is inconsistent, and the somewhat superficial
messaging adds nothing to the “what matters is that you tried” line we have
heard before.
The writing of Chhichhore (by
Tiwari himself with Nikhil Mehrotra and Piyush Gupta) is so
lacking in depth, and the direction so passionless, that it is hard to believe it
is brought to us by the same person who made Dangal. Despite its sporadic bursts of humour, Chhichhore comes across as a half-hearted enterprise.
Rating (out
of five stars): *3/4
|
CBFC Rating (India):
|
UA
|
|
Running time:
|
146 minutes
|
A version of this review has also been published on Firstpost:
Posters courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/foxstarhindi/
No comments:
Post a Comment