When two Parsis
fall in love, there’s
bound to be friction. They are such a talkative community. At least that’s what we get to know from the eccentric bustle that our movies tend to create when dealing with the community.
The love story of Shirin (Farah Khan in a remarkably poised debut) and Farhad (Boman Irani, as natural as ever) holds no surprises. They meet, they smirk, they walk hand-in-hand, he mistakes her invitation for coffee in her home for suggestion for sex. While she makes him coffee, he waits for her undressed. And you know the rest.
Beneath all the feminine giggles (bras and panties, hee hee) and male guffaws (“tera rocket kab phutega”?) that surround the theme of courtship between a middle-aged couple for whom life is neither a picnic nor a funeral, Sehgal seeks out silent passages of undulating sensitivity.
Farah Khan is specially reticent, a mysterious smile hovering in her eyes constantly as though she knows that life, and life in the movies, is a secret joke. In her scenes with her comatose screen-dad, Farah’s eyes melt with affection. Yup, she handles the emotional moments better than the comic.
Boman seems to be reined-in. He lets his debutante co-star get comfortable with the camera.
Sehgal has cast true-blue Parsi actors in all the roles, big and small. In fact, I could hardly spot any non-Parsi in the cast!
The comic vein tends to get unwieldy at times, as if the attempt to be funny has taken a toll on the characters’ sense of self-identity. We get a Parsi wacko (Kurush Deboo) who runs amok with an antique gun threatening to kill anyone who comes in his way. He doesn’t make much sense in the scheme of the plot. But then, what makes sense in life other than the senselessness that we see see all around us?
Sehgal doesn’t try to make sense of the chaos. She flows with the chaos seeking laughter in the eccentricity. Hence when an old Parsi gentleman constantly writes love notes to Indira Gandhi, you know he has lost it. And you smile, because eccentricity is a pre-condition in a rom-com about two over-the-hill Parsis, one of whom sells lingerie and meets the woman of his dreams when she comes to buy a brassiere.
Laughter designed on innerwear can never fail.
Luckily, the film goes beyond innerwear and seeks a place in one’s heart. The director emerges with some truly heartwarming moments between Boman and Farah. Unki love story to nikal padi. (IANS)
