Film: Hasee Toh Phasee
Starring: Sidharth Malhotra, Parineeti Chopra, Adah Sharma
Director: Vinil Mathew
Producer: Vikas Bahl, Hiroo Johar, Anurag Kashyap, Karan Joh
Banner: Dharma Productions, Phantom Productions
Music: Vishal - Shekhar
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.
Starring: Sidharth Malhotra, Parineeti Chopra, Adah Sharma
Director: Vinil Mathew
Producer: Vikas Bahl, Hiroo Johar, Anurag Kashyap, Karan Joh
Banner: Dharma Productions, Phantom Productions
Music: Vishal - Shekhar
"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.
