Good Luck Jerry Gives A Giggly  Spin To Gangsterism

Good Luck, Jerry

Rating: ** *

It  isn’t easy  to extract  laughter out of  drug dealers , cash-strapped migrants and cancer patients .  Good Luck, Jerry manages the herculean  feat with a  fair amount of  success. This is  not  a life-changing  film. But  it does show us how to take charge  of  our lives when the  going gets really  rough.Never mind the means.The  narrative  spills the beans  with confidence.

 Janhvi Kapoor plays the titular role of a Bihari girl in  Punjabi who  makes a living working at a massage  parlour. She is neither  a  victim nor  a schemer.The  film never over-sentimentalizes Jerry’s circumstances choosing to see her as a manuipulator rather than a  victim.

  Some  of  the best-written sequences feature with her  mother, played  with brilliant  punctuation marks by  Mita Vashisht(she is more fun and funnier  than  Saranya Ponvannan in the  original Tamil film Kolamaavu Kokila)  and a drug dealer Timmy (Jaswant Singh) who  is smitten  by the ostensible simplicity of  the  Bihari girl.

While the ‘Bihari’ accent  of  the  characters is questionable, their  propensity to  tackle hardships headlong is not. Director Siddharth Sen uses  closed-in  cramped spaces  and the dingy environment to  generate  a  feeling of  inescapable  poverty. But the  laughter never abandons the characters even when  they are  lodged in  stinking toilets.

Deepak Dobriyal is specially riotous  as Rinku,  Jerry’s  unwanted  suitor. The  conversation with  Jerry where Rinku tells her how he snubbed the advances of a woman who wanted  to marry him, is vintage Dobriyal.

While the  vast cast conducts itself  with  suitable conviction,  the  narration tends to lose its  positive  vibrations in the chaos  of a melee of gangsters  jostling for Jerry’s attention. The laughs are mostly restricted  to the earlier parts  of the film. Although the  storytelling is  never  in two minds  about  which  way the crooked  crumbles.

Everyone seems  to have a criminal  mind in this  eccentric   film, even the  supposedly decent  civilians. The  gusto with which Jerry  plunges  into her  job as  a drug dealer and the way  Janhvi  revels in playing the crooked Jerry, proves  criminal tendencies  are a part  of  the average mind. All we need  to do is  tap into it.