REVIEW 730: DREAM GIRL

Release date:	September 13, 2019
Director:	Raaj Shaandilyaa
Cast: Language:	Ayushmann Khurrana, Annu Kapoor, Vijay Raaz, Abhishek Banerjee, Nushrat Bharucha, Rajesh Sharma, Manjot Singh, Raj Bhansali, Nidhi Bisht  Hindi

Ayushmann Khurrana, poster boy of quality blockbusters in Bollywood, has made a habit of playing men leading dual lives. In Vicky Donor he was secretly a professional sperm donor. In Andhadhun he was a pianist indulging in elaborate fakery when his initial lie forces him to tell another, then another and another. Writer-director Raaj Shaandilyaa’s Dream Girl has him playing a man pretending to be a woman on a phone sex line.

Khurrana’s Karamveer Singh has had a talent for impersonating women from his childhood. In desperation for employment in his adulthood, the boy from Gokul agrees to work at a call centre at which women offer solace and conversations to men who dial in. In his avatar as the sexy sounding Puja, Karam makes an unexpected discovery. Although there are a few sleazy chappies at the other end of the line, a majority of his clients turn out to be decent folk desperate for company, empathy and a listening ear.

There is a message woven in there about the extent of loneliness in the modern world where social networking sites give people an appearance of having numerous friendships while in truth most struggle to find even a single considerate confidant. The overriding aspect of Dream Girl though is its comedy. Puja’s interactions with her/his regular callers in the first half of the film are hilarious with an underlying, understated poignance despite a spot of stereotyping here and there. Karam’s world goes dramatically awry when each one falls in love with this kind, funny stranger who seems to understand them better then those they meet on a daily basis.

From the second half, Dream Girl struggles with bumpy writing. The story and screenplay by Nirmaan D. Singh and Shaandilyaa (who is a TV comedy veteran) run out of considerable steam post interval once Karam starts trying to get rid of Puja’s admirers. The team does not know how to make the point they wish to put across without getting too preachy, or how to remain funny without getting flippant to the point of being mean and offensive. And Shaandilyaa as the dialogue writer seems not to have been struck by the irony of a film being insensitive while calling on society to be sensitive to those around us.

The downhill ride begins in a scene in which Karam visits an old lady to spill the beans on her grandson, who is one of Puja’s suitors. His comments directed at the lady’s age are jarring when contrasted with the tone of the film and his characterisation until then. Karam had tossed around a couple of such throwaway lines on his first encounter with her early in Dream Girl, but they passed off in the manner of a scene featuring an actual ageist guy and the actual ageist comments even apparently good people tend to pass in real-world social interactions without realising how hurtful they are being, and also because this was not the dominant takeaway from that passage. The post-interval scene with the grandmom though is ageist from start to finish in a crude, disturbing fashion, and ends up painting Karam as a rather nasty person which he was not shown to be until then.

The writing falters repeatedly from here on. When Karam tries to get an elderly widower out of a relationship with Puja by tapping the man’s conservatism in the matter of inter-community marriages, the scene is so poorly written and confused that it seems more like he is trying to convince the guy to stay on in the relationship.

The screenplay gets repetitive in the second half, runs out of ideas and also leaves loose ends hanging. Just when you think Dream Girl has succumbed to what critics have in the past called The Curse of the Second Half though, it picks up once again thanks to certain cast members with unfailing comic timing.

Pyaar Ka Punchnama girl Nushrat Bharucha is unable to make an impression playing Karam’s fiancee Mahi in Dream Girl. It is a measure of how irrelevant her character and that relationship are to this film, that the entire affair is pretty much wrapped up in the first half within the span of one song, the least interesting one of the lot here. The empty writing of Mahi, her grandmother and a policeman’s clichéd nagging wife shows Team Shaandilyaa’s disinterest in – or perhaps ignorance about – women. Like Mahi, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!’s Manjot Singh too is treated like a stepney by the screenplay, although he gets to evoke at least some laughter within the limited material handed to him.

Ayushmann Khurrana is good as always in Dream Girl, especially while doing women’s voices. His accents are not consistent though. His tendency to sometimes swallow words, which has been controlled by his directors in the past, is also occasionally a problem here, and is exacerbated by the sound design of Dream Girl which allows extraneous elements to drown out the spoken word here and there. Still, Khurrana holds the film together by ensuring that Puja is amusing but never a caricature.

The ones who save Dream Girl though when the writing dips are three men playing Puja’s admirers: Annu Kapoor (Vicky Donor) as an old man whose son has been urging him to remarry, Vijay Raaz (Monsoon Wedding, Delhi Belly) as a shayari-spouting Haryanvi policeman and Stree’s Abhishek Banerjee as a diffident music fan. These smashing artistes and the Meet Bros’ largely peppy soundtrack make Dream Girl worth a visit to theatres despite its rough patches.

My favourite part of the film comes with the song Dil ka telephone, which brings these disparate fellows together. Indian lyricists often mix languages randomly without the blend contributing in any way to the development of characters in a story and the scenarios they inhabit. But when Messrs Kapoor, Raaz and Banerjee’s characters turn up with the song “Tu mera dream girl bann jaaye / I’m searching for your love” written by Kumaar, the marriage of English and Hindi is comical precisely because these are men that we know absolutely do not actually speak like that. Besides, few actors have the ability to throw themselves into a situation and convince an audience to suspend disbelief like this trio can. Shaandilyaa should thank his stars that he managed to rope them in for Dream Girl.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	132 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/dream-girl-movie-review-ayushmann-khurrana-some-excellent-co-stars-are-funny-despite-bumpy-writing-7333041.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/Balajimotionpictures/

REVIEW 717: KHANDAANI SHAFAKHANA

Release date:	August 2, 2019
Director:	Shilpi Dasgupta
Cast: Language:	Sonakshi Sinha, Varun Sharma, Badshah, Annu Kapoor, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Rajiv Gupta, Nadira Babbar, Rajesh Sharma, Priyansh Jora Hindi

An old man bequeaths his Unani sex clinic in Hoshiarpur to his young niece – imagine the potential of that premise.

Sonakshi Sinha plays Baby Bedi, a medical sales representative from a struggling lower middle class family who sees light at the end of the tunnel when a beloved relative, Hakeem Tarachand (Kulbhushan Kharbanda), leaves his business to her. The conditions of his will do give her pause: she has to run the clinic for six months before she can sell it, which leaves her with a double whammy to contend with. First, she is not a qualified Unani doctor. And second, the late Hakeemsaab’s practice was frowned upon not just by society at large but also by her own family. Back-breaking debt, a mother (Nadira Babbar) and brother (Varun Sharma) who depend on her, and the possible loss of their home leave her with no choice though. And so begins her adventure.

The promise of this subject is multi-pronged – the agony of men, women and couples with sexual problems in a conservative community, the social squeamishness around sex, the restrictions placed on women, and a general unawareness about Unani medicine among a modern urban audience. If these had been tackled with depth, there is so much that Khandaani Shafakhana (Family Health Clinic) could have offered. Depth though is missing in this film that touches upon all these elements, but sinks its teeth into them only in fits and starts. It has its moments here and there. However, overall, although it is meant to be a comedy drama about sexual health, the comedy is occasionally on point but there is not enough of it, the social commentary is very occasionally insightful but not enough, and the drama is not dramatic enough.

The screenplay by Gautam Mehra lacks the life that Baby’s medicines seek to inject into her patients. With such flaccid material at hand, a perfectly good cast is wasted. Sinha is talented but her earlier works have often been pulled down by her directors’ and her own self consciousness about the shape of her large eyes, the curve of her nose and their combined effect on her profile. Here in Khandaani Shafakhana she controls that particular propensity and an intermittent tendency to play cute, turning in a performance that is as thoughtful as it can possibly be considering the flimsiness of the writing on offer and the under-confidence in debutant Shilpi Dasgupta’s direction.

Fukrey’s Varun Sharma is funny although his dialogue delivery sometimes needs clarity. Nadira Babbar manages to draw the most out of this thin story. And Annu Kapoor as the lawyer handling Hakeem Tarachand’s will is amusing to begin with, but fizzles out in the face of repetitiveness.

These four fare best among the entire lot. Superstar rapper Badshah makes his acting debut as superstar rapper Gabru Ghatack in a poorly defined role that depends too much on his real-life personality for its effectiveness. Imagine the potential here too – a musician who is all the rage having to hide his sexual disorder from an audience that has bought into his macho image. Like everything else in Khandaani Shafakhana, he too is wasted.

The one who suffers the worst injustice at the hands of this film is TV’s sweet-faced Priyansh Jora whose attractive personality makes you long for something substantial to happen to his character in the next scene, or the next scene, or the next...but it never does. As Baby’s neighbour in the locality where her dispensary is located, we notice the good-looking guy as soon as we see him. So does she. But he is given almost nothing to do.

It would be unfair to say that there is no chemistry between Sinha and Jora, because the screenplay invests zero effort in their equation. He has a star quality and it is clear in the final song that he has at least one gift that will come in handy if he wants to be a conventional Bollywood hero – he can dance – but the camera ensures that there is not enough of him even in that closing number.

Where the film does strike a chord is with Mayur Sharma’s production design of Baby’s home of limited means, the look of the titular Khandaani Shafakhana (although the dense cobwebs were inexplicable considering that Hakeem Tarachand had not abandoned what was clearly a busy practice) and the milieu of the neighbourhood in which it is situated. The middling music, on the other hand, serves only to stretch a narrative that already feels too long despite the seemingly economical running time of 2 hours 17 minutes and 38 seconds.

Sexual health is not a theme often visited by Bollywood. In 2012, Shoojit Sircar pulled off a film about a sperm donor with immense maturity and sensitivity, neither of which took away from its comedy. What his Vicky Donor had going for it, apart from his own finesse and a great cast, was a great writer: Juhi Chaturvedi. R.S. Prasanna’s Shubh Mangal Saavdhan (2017) – which also starred Vicky Donor’s Ayushmann Khurrana, this time playing a man with erectile dysfunction – was entertaining though not quite as good. There is so much of this territory that could be further explored. To place a woman at the centre of a film about a Unani sex clinic in an orthodox small town was a stroke of brilliance on the part of the team of Khandaani Shafakhana. Beyond that, the best thing about this film is that it deals with a tricky subject without getting icky at any point. That apart, Khandaani Shafakhana is an opportunity lost.

Rating (out of five stars): *3/4

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	137 minutes 18 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/khandaani-shafakhana-movie-review-sonakshi-sinha-is-handed-a-lifeless-sexual-health-clinic-7097601.html  

Visual courtesy:

https://www.facebook.com/KhandaaniShafakhana/