REVIEW 763: JAI MUMMY DI

Release date:	January 17, 2020
Director:	Navjot Gulati
Cast:	Sunny Singh, Sonnalli Seygall, Supriya Pathak Kapoor, Poonam Dhillon, Alok Nath
Language:	Hindi

If you are a fan of director Luv Ranjan’s brand of visceral misogyny in Pyaar Ka Punchnama 1 and 2 and Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety, and that is what you are hoping to get in Jai Mummy Di, then you will be disappointed. This new film, despite being co-produced by Ranjan, displays a surprising lack of animosity towards women.

If you saw the trailer of Jai Mummy Di, were intrigued by the hint of a long-buried lesbian romance and were hoping to see a film on this still taboo subject, then too you will be disappointed. 

If the pace and sense of humour you spotted in the trailer left you expecting a couple of hours of light-hearted fun, again, disappointment awaits you. 

That is the thing about director Navjot Gulati’s Jai Mummy Di. It is not regressive, not progressive, not anything.

Jai Mummy Di is the story of Pinky Bhalla (Poonam Dhillon) and Laali Khanna (Supriya Pathak Kapoor) who have been sworn enemies for decades. They are neighbours in a north Delhi locality and their mutual antagonism is so strong, that their children – Saanjh Bhalla (Sonnalli Seygall) and Puneet Khanna (Sunny Singh) – dare not reveal to the families that they have been in love since school. When the youngsters realise they cannot live without each other, they set out to find the root cause of the mothers’ hatred which, they are told, dates back to their college days. Back then, their common friend reveals, the two were so thick that they were even rumoured to be girlfriends.

The first half of Jai Mummy Di is certainly mildly funny, but the comedy and the film as a whole fizzle out as it gradually becomes clear that Gulati does not know where to take it. This was also the problem with that earlier film he wrote, 2017’s Running Shaadi starring Taapsee Pannu and Amit Sadh – there was the seed of a good idea there, but it got lost on a road to nowhere.

Once Jai Mummy Di starts going round and round in circles, it becomes limp and purposeless. Dialogues are left hanging, extra seconds hang loose and it begins to feel like an amateur stage production where the actors don’t understand poor timing.

Veterans Pathak Kapoor and Dhillon get to shout and grimace a lot, but for a film that is supposedly centred around their characters, Jai Mummy Di has precious little about them and gives them hardly any screen time in the second half. Sunny Singh and Sonnalli Seygall, both of whom are recognisable from Ranjan’s most famous films, look dapper and deliver competent even if not sparkling performances. Singh needs to work on his dialogue delivery though. In several places in the film I found myself straining my ears to figure out what he had just said because of his tendency to swallow words or shoot them out too fast.

Possibly because the Pyaar Ka Punchnamas gained notoriety for their misogyny, this screenplay tries to compensate with occasional moments of overt feminism. Saanjh demands to know why a woman must follow her husband wherever he goes after marriage, and Puneet does not disagree. When they hear of the possibility that their mothers were once romantically involved with each other, they respond with a complete lack of judgement. But these instances of pointed liberalism add up to nothing when actor Alok Nath surfaces intermittently in the narrative as a hanger on, and it appears that although the man has no particular role to play in this film, he has been placed there as an act of defiance against those who asked why he was cast in Ranjan’s last production De De Pyaar De despite the allegations of rape and harassment that surfaced against him during the Me Too movement in 2018, allegations he responded to with the most bizarre, apathetic non-denial.

His presence is just a distracting irritant. What really kills this film is the supposed big reveal in the end about Laali and Pinky’s intense enmity. It is so poorly conceived and so so ordinary, that you have to wonder why this plain film was ever made. Seriously, why?

Rating (out of 5 stars): 0.5

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	106 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/jai-mummy-di-movie-review-pyaar-ka-punchnamas-team-returns-with-a-not-regressive-not-progressive-not-anything-film-7918781.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jai_Mummy_Di

REVIEW 209: RAMAIYA VASTAVAIYA

Release date:	July 19, 2013
Director:	Prabhudeva
Cast: Language:	Girish Kumar, Sonu Sood, Shruti Haasan, Satish Shah, Poonam Dhillon, Vinod Khanna, Nassar, Randhir Kapoor, Govind Namdeo   Hindi

At one point in Ramaiya Vastavaiya, a man hiding in a bush gets urinated upon by another guy. This scene comes not long after one character gets hit in the crotch by a hard object and the hero of the film has been urinated upon by a cow when he tries to milk it. Ram (that’s the boy’s name) also steps on dung during the course of the film, falls flat on his face in a dung heap, has his bottom butted by a goat, watches a row of cattle in a shed shit in sync and lifts up the tail of one animal to spray perfume on its anus since he’s sleeping next it.

All this happens while he tries to win a challenge thrown at him by his lady love Sona’s brother. Bhaiyya says that spoilt rich NRI kid’s love for sis is shallow and will not be able to withstand the agricultural experience. Kid says, test me. Bhaiyya says, cultivate the land and if you can produce more grain than I do in one season, you can have my sis. Kid says, deal! Of course Sona doesn’t have a say in all this though she is – for reasons that no running time can possibly explain – actually in love with the charmless guy.  

Ramaiya Vastavaiya is such a dated and formulaic film that it begs the question: why was it made? Answer: it’s been made to launch Girish Kumar Taurani, son of producer Kumar Taurani who owns Tips Industries. I hate to be discouraging when the subject is a young person, but sometimes the kindest thing you can do is to say it straight: Girish is not cut out for this. He can’t act so he over-acts. He can’t convincingly play innocent, cute or boisterous, so his Ram ends up behaving like an irritating buffoon (which might explain why Sona calls him a bandar and a gorilla at their early meetings). Since everyone in Bollywood does it these days, he takes off his shirt at one point. And while I can’t find anything particularly wrong with his dancing, its lack of extraordinariness is highlighted by the sight of Shruti Haasan – graceful and so evidently rooted in classical traditions – moving to the same songs.

Sonu Sood plays the over-protective brother Raghuvir to Shruti’s Sona. All he wants for his sister is a simple husband who will keep her happy in their village, but Sona meets Ram at her best friend’s wedding and falls in love. That’s when the stupid  challenge comes up to occupy the entire second half of the film. Sonu manages to retain his dignity despite the ludicrousness of the goings-on around him, but many members of the supporting cast – especially veteran southern Indian actor Nassar and the usually reliable Hindi character artiste Zakir Hussain – embarrass themselves and us with their hamming. Poonam Dhillon owes it to herself not to accept such bad films, and Prabhudeva must explain why he roped in a fine actor like Vinod Khanna to hang around the leads and do next to nothing. 

Ramaiya Vastavaiya is a remake of the Telugu hit Nuvvostanante Nenoddantana with which Prabhudeva made his directorial debut. The storyline is the same but that film had two genuine actors – Siddharth Narayan and Trisha Krishnan – as the leads. The Hindi version has Girish who doesn’t possess a single acting cell in his being and Shruti who, though miles ahead of him, still has some way to go in that department. To make matters worse, the film is filled with a ton of clichéd characters and trite situations that Bollywood simply refuses to bury… So, for instance, the rich boy’s mother (Poonam Dhillon) is positioned as a bitch who is nasty to her husband (Randhir Kapoor) whereas the said husband is projected as cool because he hits on women quarter his age and encourages his son to be a flirt. At one point when a heartbroken Ram is brooding over his love, Prabhudeva and Jacqueline Fernandez materialise from nowhere to dance vigorously to a song in the fields. Sona’s most prized possession is a clay horse gifted to her by her brother and Ram risks his life to keep it safe. Even Jeene laga hoon in Aatif Aslam’s voice, which sounds lovely as a standalone song, loses half its sheen when you hear it in this silly film.

In the midst of all this nonsense, a pleasantly surprising bit of progressiveness… Despite the way the storyline goes, not a single character brings up that horridly regressive term “ghar jamaai”, and no one sneers at Ram for moving to Sona’s village. But that’s a rare bright spot in this otherwise dreary film. In a moment of blinding candour, at one point a character says to Ram: “Tumhe lagta hai na ki yeh kitne puraane ghise-pitey khayalat hai?” He should have said “ghisa-pita film”! 

What else? Oh ya, there’s a villain, a fight and a mangalsutra in the climax that I won’t tell you about in case you do venture out to watch Ramaiya Vastavaiya. Personally, if I could sue for the over two hours of my life lost to this film, I would.

Rating (out of five): 1/2 (half a star out of five)

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	148 minutes

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramaiya_Vastavaiya  

REVIEW 91: MILEY NAA MILEY HUM

Release date:	November 4, 2011
Director:	Tanveer Khan
Cast:	Chirag Paswan, Poonam Dhillon, Kabir Bedi, Kangna Ranaut, Sagarika Ghatge, Neeru Bajwa

The good thing about Miley Naa Miley Hum is that it marks the debut of a sweet-looking actor called Chirag Paswan. Politician Ram Vilas Paswan’s son has a pleasant presence on screen and a well worked out body (though I can imagine my mother smacking him between the shoulder blades and telling him to improve his posture). The other positive point is that I actually enjoyed Kangna Ranaut’s performance – it’s been a while since that’s happened! Here’s an actress who started off being so interesting but somehow somewhere lost her way with her awkward diction, poor voice modulation and disappointing choice of roles. In Miley Naa Miley Hum she looks refreshingly pretty and is genuinely funny playing a guileless, accident-prone model.

So what’s the story? Paswan Junior plays Chirag Mehra, a rising tennis star whose warring parents have torn him asunder all his life. He’s determined to divide his time between them until he finds a way to get them together again. So, he works at his father Siddharth Mehra’s vineyard but also travels to the city to help his mother manage her business empire. Trouble starts when mom (Poonam Dhillon) tries to fix him up with her London-based friend’s daughter Kamiah Malhotra (Chak De girl Sagarika Ghatge) while dad (Kabir Bedi) gets into competitive mode and promises him to Manjeet Ahluwalia (Neeru Bajwa), the daughter of his boisterous, rustic buddy from Bhatinda. Chirag is not interested in marriage, so in an inspired moment he points to a model on a hoarding (Anishka played by Ranaut) and claims he’s in love with her.

If you think about it, that précis is filled with promise, and the catchy song Katto Gilheri Chamak Challo Rani featuring a lovely-looking Shweta Tiwari arrives early in the narrative to suggest that this film will be an entertainer. But Miley Naa Miley Hum’s dialogues are amateurish, and the script fails to flesh out most of its characters or explore their relationships with any depth. So it’s nice to see older actors get so much screen time playing Chirag’s parents, but the reason for their animosity towards each other is never established although it’s the fulcrum of the film. We are told in passing that he was playing tennis while she was in labour, which led her to believe that the game was more important to him than his wife, but … naah, that sounds too flimsy to be credible. Again, since Chirag coped with his parents’ hatred for each other throughout his childhood, the circumstances that drive him over the edge as an adult don’t seem compelling enough; nor does the director manage to make us share Chirag’s desperation to re-unite mom and dad.

Manjeet from Bhatinda is a parasite, but Chirag seems fond of Kamiah from London … Why then is a sweet guy like him so insensitive to her feelings? Why does he not bother to explain to her his reasons for opposing their match? Manjeet, incidentally, is introduced to us in the film’s most ridiculous scene: Siddharth Mehra phones her father during her engagement party and expresses a desire to have her as his bahu; daddy dear simply gets off the phone and cancels her engagement … because apparently that’s what you do for a good friend … and when her fiancé’s family gets furious, Manjeet yells at them … because she blindly believes that her father must have a good reason for doing what he did, no questions asked! Yeah sure! Very convincing! Ranaut’s character Anishka is introduced to us in an understatedly amusing scene (she tastes sushi for the first time and describes it as “kachchi machchhi”) but she then disappears for a long gap, and nothing is done to keep her on our minds in the interregnum. The tennis match in the finale should have been a high-adrenaline experience but it’s not written or edited well enough for that. There is an adopted brother in the picture who loyally follows Chirag everywhere, but we are told little about him. Besides director Tanveer Khan is so focused on the hero’s looks that he allows the make-up artist to coat Paswan Junior’s face with too much pancake, while allowing spots to show on Ranaut’s skin in several shots.

We’ve seen children of broken or troubled marriages in other Hindi films (Akele Hum Akele Tum, Life In A Metro, We Are Family) but it’s unusual for Bollywood to deal with the impact of a parental split on adult offspring. Miley Naa Miley Hum is not insufferable, it’s even nice in places, but it sorely lacks depth! Still, there’s something likeable about debutant Chirag Paswan – and that’s something to hold on to.

Rating (out of five): *1/2

CBFC Rating:                       U without cuts

Running time:                        125 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/#!/MNMHthemovie