Thank You  CBFC For Withholding Padmavati & Certifying Tera Intezaar On  Time

Starring Sunny Leone , Arbaaz Khan, Aarya  Babbar, Salil Ankola, Sudha Chandran

Directed  by Rajeev Walia

Rating:  (0 stars)

If God, CBFC and  Karni Sena(not necessarily in that order) had  permitted we’d be watching  Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmavati  this week But the  Gods below in all their wisdom, decided to pull the plug on Padmavati.

Instead we have this amazing homage to Indian womanhood called Tera Intezaar where Sunny Leone, clearly the poster-girl of our sanskari CBFC channel, cavorts  in bikinis, briefs and  blouses that flatter to deceive. And flutter to titillate.

The Padmavati haters will love this one. The makers of Tera Intezaar have made sure that our precious Bharatiya sabhyata doesn’t suffer any dent bruise or hurt.Hence  the  appealing Ms Leone dances a  lot including to the beats  of  a  song that goes ‘Main Hoon Sexy Barbie Girl’,  but never the Ghoomar—God forbid!  And her leading man—the  most wooden Khan hero you  will ever see—is named, hold you  breath and  swords,  Rajeev Rajput.

 Sushant, go eat your heart  out.

That  apart, here  is  the thing about this strange  collage of  disembodied  images masquerading as  a movie.Ms Leone, who , I repeat, doesn’t do the Ghoomar,   doesn’t really show anything we haven’t seen before. Nor does she  show  anything we’d like to see. She is no more your woman from the forbidden (wet) dreams. She is now this devoted intense art dealer named Rounak who patronizes a new artiste Rajeev who disappears  on her .

They meet and sing songs about waiting for  love to happen.

 Rounak is distraught(we  know, because Ms Leone’s lips tremble, her eyelashes  flutter and her  bosom heaves).She takes the help of a clairvoyant(Sudha Chandran, trying hard to look like a school teacher who has  just caught her favourite student with a naughty video clip of Sunny Leone ) and a  guy on the phone whom Ms Leone keeps calling  ‘Jijoo’ probably because he  is married  to her sister.

I figured the relation, because watching a film like this sharpens the intellect.

The villains  of the piece are four crooked art dealers. Now, the thing is ,  this quartet of crooks  hangs around together all the time.And I  mean ALL the time, maybe they even  go to the loo together. They are together in every single frame. And I mean  every FRAME which includes portraits  hanging on the wall…don’t ask me how or why they get there. It’s too complicated  to explain.  All  I  know  is Sanjay Leela Bhansali could never dream of scaling the  depths of  relevance and heights  of meaning achieved  in Tera Intezaar.

My heart bled for  poor Rounak as she  searched  for her lost love.Poor things! Little did she know that the hero was missing because he was  played by Arbaaz Khan the most embarrassing Khan  we’ve ever seen  perform, or  not  perform, in our cinema.

It saddened  me to see the very distinguished parliamentarian-actor Raj Babbar’s son Aaryaand former cricketer Salil Ankola playing goons and hamming so intensely I feared for their facial muscles . Of course I understand the fact that when  you have a hero who is stiff in all the wrong  places the  director(or whoever is responsible  for putting together this work of timeless art) must have actors who really ACT with all their might.

  But all shared and dumb, Tera Intezaar is primarily a  showcase  for Sunny Leone’s  unfathomable virtuosity. She  goes from besotted lover girl  to inconsolably bereaved  beloved without  missing a  beat. She  is  truly our poster-girl for Make In India.In one sequence she  falls to the ground in  a morgue weeping(with a door marked ‘Mortuary Room’) as Arbaaz appears before her as a ghost.

There, Ms Leone wept for all the wandering spirits  of  the universe.

So thank you, CBFC for  putting Padmavati in its place  by putting Tera Intezaar in its place.