FILM: Hasee Toh Phasee
CAST: Parineeti Chopra, Siddharth Malhotra, Adah Sharma;
DIRECTOR: Vinil Mathew
She is certifiably wacko, eats toothpaste, hobnobs with foreign powers, steals from her father, talks Mandarin and bluntly asks her sister’s fiance to marry her.
“I promise I won’t run away…Life-time guarantee,” Parineeti Chopra, as the zany fey and mad Meeta tells Siddharth Malhotra in a beautifully written and directed sequence in an empty bus.
Ab bus bhi karo! How many more commercial Indian films are going to be set in the Great Big Fat Indian Wedding? And really, after Kareena Kapoor in Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met, Kangna Ranaut in Aanand Rai’s Tanu Weds Manu and Katrina Kaif in Mere Brother Ki Shaadi , there’s nothing runaway brides can do to shock us any more…
So wait, don’t go away. The good news is, there is no runaway bride in Hasee Toh Phasee. But don’t break into a Bhangra as yet. Because there is a runaway bridegroom.
Set during a Gujarati wedding between two souls who are not meant to be together, the film at heart is not a comedy at all…unless you think a grown-up girl who is locked up for hours in a room peeing in her pants is funny….so I wonder why it was promoted as one!
Though the surface mood of the film is skittish and cheeky, “Hasee Toh Phasee” is an unmistakably somber study of dysfunctionality as seen during a time of tremendous festivity.
So here’s the the all-too-familiar scenario. Nikhil(Siddharth Malhotra) is about to marry Ms Money. Luckily for Nikhil and for the audience Karishma, as played by the sweetly believable Adah Sharma, is not a rich bitch like the hero’s embarrassing fiancee in this weeks other release Babloo Happy Hai. She is rich. But not a bitch. Got that?
The characters in this darkly humorous tale of misfits and other adventurers steadily remain within the realm of the believable even the situations handed over to them by the uneven but effective script wobble dangerously out of control.
Many sequences such as the one where Parineeti takes a brood of old wedding guests through a wild walk through the bustling lanes of Delhi , lose their warmth in translation. They must have sounded engaging on paper, though.
Nonetheless there is so much here that just warms up the inner-most spaces in our hearts.
The longish sequence where Nikhil takes Parineeti outside her home so she can get a glimpse of her estranged father, or that moment when Nikhil picks her up from a dingy guest house…these are bravely written scenes.
The director is not afraid of silences. Several episodes are done without the prop of a background score.
While there are too many songs popping up here there and every-wail, the “Zehnaseeb” track that shows up at the climax adds just the right flavour and fervor to the proceedings.
There are many sluggish moments in the storytelling. You wish the editing would have been tighter. You wish the film’s setting and festive mood had been less cliched.
And you wish there wasn’t so much stress on catching the characters in a constant condition of quirkiness. It’s like watching decent people on pot and on the potty all the time.
But then there is Parineeti Chopra, so wonderfully articulate even as she grapples to command the gibberish grammarof her character’s screwed-up personality.
It’s definitely not easy to play a wacko with such steadfast empathy. Parineeti again proves herself one of the finest actresses of our times.
Siddharth Malhotra seems more taken up with putting his best profile forward on screen.
He struggles to subjugate his innate vanity and look sincere in his space.
But it’s a losing battle. One doesn’t see the actor identify with his character’s wayward entrepreneurship and his sudden discovery of a protective warmth towards the zany girl who jumps in to his life.
Mohan Joshi as the bride Adah Sharma and the bride’s sister Parineeti Chopra’s father gives a first-rate performance. To me this is more a father-daughter drama than a loverboy-wackogirl rom-com.
No matter how you look at it, the film and every rich resplendent moment in it, belongs to Parineeti Chopra.
She irons out all the rough spots in the storytelling, hides all the wrinkles in the jaded plot and makes her character seem far more empathetic than it would have been in a lesser actress’ hands.
Yup, if the film gets your undivided attention it’s because Parineeti won’t let us look away. (IANS)
FILM: Saving Mr. Banks
CAST: Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Paul Giamatti, Jason Schwartzman, Colin Farrell, Bradley Whitford, Ruth Wilson…
DIRECTOR: John Hancock
An engaging, well-crafted and mounted drama, Saving Mr. Banks is the Golden Jubilee tribute to Walt Disney’s 1964 family musical hit, Mary Poppins.
The film is a very intimate representation that unravels the source, adaptation and making of the legendary classic, Mary Poppins. Touted to be a real story of Walter Disney’s travails in the making of the film, it also encapsulates the life of the author, P.L. Travers along with dollops of Disney magic. The screenplay by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith seamlessly stitches a layered narrative, one in the present period, which happens to be 1961, where it exhibits the conflict between Travers and Walter Disney and the other in 1906 that explores Travers’ childhood in Australia; her relationship with her alcoholic father, Travers Goff, her mother’s attempted suicide and the arrival of her aunt, her hope for a better tomorrow.
What starts off as a light-hearted, somewhat prickly comedy about a cranky novelist slowly becomes something more sentimental, eloquent and meaningful.
The film opens to author P.L Travers caught in a quandary over financial issues in London. Her agent tries hard to find her a good patron who would give her a substantial royalty. But unfortunately, she is pretty finicky about transferring her rights of the book. So in a stalemate situation, her agent cajoles her to travel to LA to negotiate with Mr. Walter Disney directly, who for the past 20 years has been trying hard to adapt the book for the film.
While the first half of the film delves in building the personality of Travers intermingled with her memories as a child. The second half throws you into the battle royale, where Disney musters all his charm and enthusiasm in the hope that Travers may concede to the idea of letting go her book for a film version.
But Travers remains inflexible and continues to clash with the team working on developing the script.
Thwarted at every turn, it looks as though “Mary Poppins” will never be made. But thanks to Mr. Disney’s perseverance, he manages to strum the right chord with Travers. Though viewers are aware about the conclusion of the film, it is the journey that is remarkable.
The film works purely and simply on all fronts. The acting, script and visuals are all fascinating. With twice Academy winners, Tom Hanks and Emma Thomp-son, “Saving Mr. Banks” is a viewer’s delight. Thompson takes Travers from being an amusing with irrational impossibility, to an emotional human we can all sympathize with. She mesmerizes you with her outstanding performance, in fact even outshines Hanks on several occasions. She is ably supported by Annie Rose Buckley as the young P.L.Travers, who was fondly nicknamed Ginty by her dad played by Colin Farrell.
Farrell creates the perfect balance, where you sympathize, as well as loath him for being a fantasist addicted to the bottle.
The visuals may seem deceptively simple on the surface, but juxtaposing the images of 1906 with 1961 is an art by itself.
The efforts of Production Designer Michael Corenblith, cinematographer John Schwartzman and costume designer Daniel Orlandi are blatantly evident in the film with: The golden hued images of rural Australia, Travers’ London Home, The Airport scenes in 1961 along with sequences in Burbank and Disneyland.
This film is Director John Hancock’s best film. And with all its brilliance and complexities, the film has a feel-good factor that remains etched in your memory, long after you leave the theater. (IANS)