Movie Review Fry Day: Govinda Shines Again

Fry Day

Starring Govinda, Varun Sharma, Prabhleen Sandhu,  Digangana Survanshi

Directed by Abhishek Dogra

Rating; ***(3 stars)

 At last, Govinda  has a blast.And so, I must confess, do we. Fry Day is a surprisingly  palatable marital  comedy  with some really funny throwaway lines , and  of course the actors’ comic timing which goes a   long  way in supplanting a  certain  sparkle to even  some  of the potentially stiff scenes.

Stagey and saucy,  this is a play-on-film with most  of  the  events unfolding on one location.And yet  director AbhishekDogra(remember his  wacked-out Sonam Kapoor-helmed comedy Dolly  Ki Doli ?) keeps the pace on a leash,never letting the overwrought characters go out of  the playing field wven when the  ball is  not in their  court.

The comedy on infidelity, last seen  conveying a  smiliar  swerve  into  the vista of  verve in  B R Chopra’s Pati Patni AurWoh, stars Govinda as Gagan, a stage  actor with a roving eye. Early in the  plot Govinda is seen on stage  doing a  hilarious  takeoff on  Mughal-e-Azam highjacking every actor’s lines on stage  as though he owns them.

The  sequence reminded  me  of the staged Ram Leela  in  Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron . The actors   have a field-day fielding the witty lines.  But I wish  the writers Rajeev Kaul and Manurishi Chadha  had avoided  the tendency to rhyme every line with the  next. It makes the actors look like they are mouthing rehearsed lines when  in fact  the performances are  defined by a sense  of  spontaneity, none more so than Govinda. Also, the background score is  over punctuated. For example if someone mentions a donkey we hear a  braying on  the background.

Much  of the comedy of errors is stage-managed by  Govinda who seems  to be having fun after a long time.Giving him kindred  company is  the  very watchable Varun Sharma.I’ve never seen two comic actors match their wits so  wonderfully on screen before. Let us have  more of this duo together.

Other seasoned  actors  like Rajesh Varma , Ishtiyaq Khan and Brajendra Kala come in for a  bit, add their own wacked-out charm to a story that depends entirely on the  comic  timing of the actors  for its efficacy .

Surprisingly stripped  of  ribald  humour and  inured  to the  theme of  marital  fidelity/infidelity  Fry Day had me laughing out loud more than  once,   specially when Govinda brazenly cheating on his wife(played b ya  very dignified Prabhleen Sandhu) hears  the  doorbell while in a compromising position.

“Could that be  your wife?” Someone  wonders aloud.

“No,  she said she will be back tomorrow, she can’t betray my trust,” Govinda dead-pans. For  this line  alone I forgiveGovinda  all his recent trespasses