Doordarshan
Starring Manu Rishi Chadha, Dolly Ahluwalia, Mahie Gill
Directed by Gagan Puri
Rating: * ½ (one and a half stars)
Some ideas are best left on paper. This film must have been a ROLF affair when the team must have sat over chai and pakodas, congratulating each other for the uniqueness of the idea.
Come,let me share it with you. An old woman in a coma for 30 years wakes up thinking this is still the 1980s. Get it?
Ha ha ha.
Sadly, this heartbreaking comedy loses its body and soul in translation. The screen rendering is so flat that I wondered how reasonably competent actors could be such failures delivering lines that must been funny on paper. On screen the gags skits and jokes sound like exchanges between teenagers on a particularly daft whatsapp group.
Grandma Dolly Ahluwalia hams while in coma and hams even more on coming awake. For that miracle of the awakening to happen, we have to wait a good half an hour into the sorry storytelling .If I had any sense, I’d have bolted out before the lady awakens, because the characters with their provincial precocity will put you to sleep by the time grandma wakes up.
Once Dollyji is awake, jokes about Ramayan and Buniyaad , cellphones and dish antennae burst into the plot like unseasonal rain. There are lots of penis and tatti(excreta)jokes too .All this is meant to be monstrously funny.Sadly,the intended humour gives off the air of a fetid skit that even national television Doordarshan would reject. Just who thought this was worth putting into the public domain is a mystery I’d love to solve.
Manu Rishi Chadha as the householder trying to hold the plot together is the bravest actor I’ve seen since Ashok Kumar in Manoj Kumar’s Clerk trying to do the Independence Day parade lying prostrate on bed in a comatose state.
Like Dolly Ahluwalia’s character this is a comatose comedy coming alive long after Doodarshan skits went out of style.An embarrassment for all .
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