Filmworld
'Badmaashiyan' - come, smile a while (Movie Review)
By
By Subhash K. JhaFilm: "Badmaashiyan"; Cast: Suzanna Mukherjee, Sidhant Gupta, Karan Mehra, Sharib Hashmi; Director: Amit Khanna; Rating: ***
A
well-intended sawach-aur-saaf-suthri comedy "Badmaashiyan" is a
curiously content-driven rom-com with one of the most consistently
wicked female protagonists I've seen in recent cinema from Bollywood or
Hollywood.
Unlike the over-praised "Dolly Ki Doli" where Sonam
Kapoor was hailed as a new-age heroine for conning her way through
multiple marriages, newcomer Suzanna Mukherjee ironically named Naari in
"Badmaashiyaan" ,is unabashedly moral, money-minded to the point of
being vulgar in her avarice. Suzanna plays the character with just the
right doses of devilish cuteness to make Naari seductive and palatable.
It is quite a debut. The actress' insouciant materialism holds the
clever inventive plot together.
The men are hopelessly hooked to
the deceitful damsel. The plot divides Naari's con games into three
unmarked sections, the first when an unsuspecting well-meaning dude from
Chandigarh Dev(Sidhant Gupta, confident and screen-friendly) falls
head-over-heels for the con-woman.
In a rolicking relay race of
romantic renewal the baton of romancing Naari is then passed to a quirky
detective named Pinkesh (played with precocious panache by Karan
Mehra).
It is really in the third romantic interlude that the
plot tickles the funny bones the most when a dreaded don Jazzy (Sharib
Hashmi, a delight to watch) becomes putty in the pretty con woman's
hands.
The three besotted lovers' characters are intersected into
unlikely junctions . The smartly written comedy(Kushal Ved Bakshi)
manages to stay a few baby-steps ahead of audiences. The writing
sparkles when Naari does her eyelash-batting coquettish act with her men
who choose to get fooled becauseawell, because some believe men think
with a body part other than brains when they are in love.
This
premise is brought into play with immense vibrancy and surprisingly no
vulgarity. Think of it. A rom-com about three guys with healthy
appetites lusting after a sexy young tease. And no double meaning? The
censor board must have swooned in delight.
I specially liked the
sequence where Naari tries to feed a sob story about her mother stricken
with cancer to Pinkesh who reminds Naari not too gently that he saw the
"ill' mother dancing vigorously.
It's all done in the spirit of a
buoyant but clean bordello humour. Not all of it works. At the start
there is a horribly mis-constructed bank-robbery sequence with a female
actor hamming so hard you fear for the narrative's wellbeing. After a
false start director Amit Khanna picks up the threads of the plot and
weaves them nimbly into the lives of his characters, all of whom are
much less acool' than they'd like to believe.
"Badmaashiyan"
conveys a pleasant in-through-the-out-door feeling. The film is set in
Chandigarh and delivers some priceless barbs at the city's expensive. A
wannabe groom wants to know why so many girls from Chandigarh are named
Pooja or Neha , why they are fans of Shah Rukh Khan and why they end up
becoming dress designers.
"Badmaashiyan" revels in an innocuous
irreverence. It's an original and frequently funny comedy of ongoing
errors where various characters including a wholesome
conscience-stricken girl (Gunjan Malhotra), a hilariously over-the-top
Sardarji and a clueless gangster's right-hand-man (played with fantastic
fervor by Nitin Goswami) meet and collide creative a crackling hissing
humour. Most of all, the female protagonist is wickedly duplicitous to
the last. Talented new actors who know how to juice funny scenes for all
they are worth make this a warmly welcome comedy.