Chhichhore Looks Like Raju Hirani’s World Without Aamir

After Dangal everybody presumed  Aamir Khan would once again team up with the very talented  director Nitesh Tiwari.

Now we  know why Aamir is  not  in Chhichhore. The film, as encapsulated in the lengthy  and  loquacious trailer, looks like the world Aami,Madhavan, Sharman and Co inhabited  in  Hirani’s  3 Idiots. There is the ever-onerous Sushant Singh Rajput, all  small-towned and  hair-slickenedwith a vacuous grin arriving  at  the college hostel with dreams in his eyes and an itch in his pants. There  is Varun Sharma, who for a change, seems the smarter among  the two friends.

 Sushant plays the  wide-eyed  ingenue to  the hilt.When the girl on the campus Shradha Kapoor, looking like  a long-lost cousin  of Ayesha Jhulkafrom Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar and  Kajol’s mooh-boli bahen in  Kuch Kuch Hota Hai,  touches Sushant(most appropriately)he makes a noise like someone fingering  a raw wound. Ouch.

These’re actors playing eager  novices  in a campus filled with hilarious hopes and kooky aspirations, the kind we saw recently in that under-celebrated  web series Kota Factory.

More  interesting than  both Sushant and  Varun is the gallery of  unexposed faces playing the  student fraternity. They all seem exceptionally talented.  Lest we forget, director Nitesh Tiwary gave us talent like Zaira Wasim and Fatima Sana Shaikh in Dangal.

It’s time for  the  boys to make  some  noise. The  mood on Tiwary’s college campus is  earnest and  irrepressible. Then quickly  the trailer’s tempo transforms to a willowy midlife with all the  students transformed physically by adept prosthetics  from students to householders, and it is  a  not-so-subtle  swing-shift of  mood  from the prankish to somber with Rajput’s screen-son in hospital as  the old friends gather together  to tackle the tragedy on hands.

Okay guys, I CU.

Curiously  the trailer gives away the entire plot of  the  film.And that’s a  good thing.  Nitesh Tiwary knows it’s  the first trailer that  decides a film’s  fate. Chhichhore(I am yet to figure out the  number  of  ‘h’s in  the title) wins you over with its  sincerity simplicity transparency and straightforwardness.

 Judging  by the trailer  I don’t think the  film has anything very  new or  profound to tell.Nor is there a  major social  comment here. Like the best cinematic experiences  this one takes us through  experiences that we all know,without getting  over-familiar. It  knows how  far to go  and where to stop.