Film: "Chashme Baddoor"; Cast: Rishi Kapoor, Lilette Dubey, Ali Zafar, Siddharth, Divyendu Sharma, Taapsee Pannu and Anupam Kher; Director: David Dhawan; Rating: ***1/2
"Dum hai, Boss!" - the perky young Miss Congeniality in David Dhawan's "Chashme Baddoor", a far cry from the shastriya sangeet trainee tutti fruti-eating Deepti Naval in Sai Paranjpye's film, exclaims whenever she is impressed by her loverboy's dialogue-baazi.
Exclamation marks are the only punctuations in this seamless comedy of courtship played at an impossibly high octave, without getting shrill.
'Farce' things first. Barring the core theme of two friends maliciously nipping the third friend's romance in the bud, and some mischievous sequences and characters from the original, which have been entirely re-interpreted as 'swines of the times', Dhawan's "Chashme Baddoor" is far(ce) removed from Paranjpye's original.
Those were days of relative innocence. Whistling at girls at bus stops, chasing unwilling girls to their homes, and landing up at their doorstep under assumed identities were all considered innocuous bachelor bacchanalia. In Paranjpye's "Chashme Buddoor", it was a big deal that Rakesh Bedi managed to get into Deepti Naval's bathroom pretending to be a plumber.
In Dhawan's film, the very gifted Divyendu Sharma, who plays Bedi's part, just can't pretend to know the perky girl next-door intimately by her bathroom decor. He manages to take a picture of a tattoo on her waist to convince his love-smitten pal Sid (Ali Zafar) that the girl is... well, not chaste but quite a 'chalu cheez'.
While the writing gets 'chalu', it miraculously steers clear of being cheesy by a wide margin. Under the veneer of vicious courtship games played by two desperately single guys, Dhawan's "Chashme Baddoor" retains a core of innocence. A tongue-in-cheek virtuosity remains the film's greatest triumph. Sajid-Farhad's writing is wild, naughty and witty, but never vulgar. The whimsical word-play flows from a tap-dance of prankish internet-styled banter which is border-line silly but nonetheless very engaging in an off-handedly smart way.
If anything, the repartees flow much too furiously. From Anupam Kher's slap-happy mother Bharati Achrekar (effortly replacing Leela Mishra from the original) to Goan cafe owner Rishi Kapoor's unidentifiable assistant - everyone is a certifiable quipster in the new film.
Among the three protagonists, Divyendu, playing an awful self-styled shaayar, gets the most tawdry lines of bumper-sticker wisdom, which the actor delivers with such punctuated panache, we can't help guffawing out our implicit 'irshaad'.
Comic timing is of vital importance to this film. And every actor gets it right, dead-on sometime dead-pan. To me, the film's most natural-born scenestealer is the southern star Siddharth. Seen lately in Deepa Mehta's "Midnight's Children", Siddharth nails his character's filmy flamboyance. Many would say Siddharth has gone over the top. But to sustain that high-pitched level of crazy energy throughout the film is no laughing matter.
Or, on second thoughts, this talented actor's performance is indeed a laughing matter.
Ali Zafar is far more sober and controlled than his co-stars. It takes some doing to remain steadfast in your stipulated sobriety while all your co-stars pull out all stops.
The laughs, so refreshingly liberated of lewdness flow almost non-stop. Adding a dollop of spice to the original script is an entirely unscheduled love angle between Rishi Kapoor and Lilette Dubey. Lallan Miya (Saeed Jaffrey), who played Rishi's character in Paranjpye's film would have loved that. Outstanding both, Kapoor and Dubey make their onscreen romance look warm, cuddlesome and credible.
Audaciously, Dhawan and his writer Sajid-Farhad have transferred the celebrated
'chamko' detergent demonstration-sequence between Farooque Sheikh and Deepti Naval in Sai Paranjpye's film to the Rishi-Lilette characters. Maybe the writers saw this pair's chemistry to be more frothy and foamy than the central romance?
Ali Zafar's courtship of the vivacious Taapsee Pannu is relatively 'thanda'. One reason for their frosty compatibility is Ali Zafar's reined-in performance. He deliberately plays his part a few octaves lower than his loud co-stars who are so hyper-strung that you sometimes wonder which drugs they are on.
This "Chashme Baddoor" moves wickedly at its own volition creating a crazy pattern of comic chaos that stops short of being anarchic due to the finely-tuned situational satire simulated in the writing out of a material that was created 30 years ago when there were no mobile phones and the height of male voyeurism was the Playboy magazine.
Dhawan's film doesn't take the characters' contemporary courtship games into areas that would offend the moralists. He knows where to stop.
Just when my faith in remakes had been shaken by "Himmatwala" last week, David Dhawan had me shaking with laughter this week.
Carry on, Mr. Dhawan. David Dhawan's new-age interpretation of the 1981 film moves far away from the original creating for itself a new pathway of laughter and hilarity without showing any disrespect to the source material.
Ali, Divyendu and Siddharth's audacious antics, with Rishi Kapoor and Lilette Dubey's age-defying romance thrown in for added measure, make the trio of girl-crazy heroes in Paranjpye's film look like angels. This is David Dhawan's wickedest comedy of one-upmanship since "Mujhse Shaadi Karogi". You can't miss it. The attention-grabbing chest-thumping gibberish-spewing rowdy boyz won't let you.
Dum hai, Boss!
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/323775/chashme-baddoor-dum-hai-boss.html
Chashme Baddoor
Cast: Ali Zafar, Siddharth, Divyendu Sharma, Tapsee Pannu, Rishi Kapoor, Anupam Kher, Lilette Dubey
Direction: David Dhawan
Rating:
Statutory warning: This is a David Dhawan film. Any resemblance to anything sensible is purely coincidental.
Any
resemblance to the original film Sai Paranjpye made in 1981 is foolish.
Being a remake, Dhawans 2013 update was bound to bear similarity as
far as the story goes. For everything else, the new film is as different
from the old one as junk food is from a veggie thali served in a family
restaurant. Going by his last two dud releases, Rascals and Do Knot Disturb, Dhawan is clearly out of ideas these days. Hence the ploy to remake a cult comedy hit.
Perhaps it was meant to be an impish signal, but Dhawan has changed the spelling of the second word in the films title. Paranjpyes Chashme Buddoor becomes Chashme Baddoor here. As bud gets bad, a familiar tale of buddy bonding that seemed so innocent three decades ago acquires the trademark David Dhawan corny twist.
Dhawan reorients Paranjpyes middle-of-the-road idiom to suit his brand of slapstick. The package is deceptively trendy - obviously to woo the urban youth - but you do not miss the filmmakers well-known slant at pleasing the masses all along.
Ali Zafar, Siddharth and Divyendu Sharma play Sid, Jai and Omi - three friends who share a small house. To pump up the glamour quotient this remake moves to Goa (the setting of the original film was Delhi). Jai and Omi are basically no-gooders whose full-time occupation seems to be chasing girls. Sid is more focussed about life.
You know what follows if you have seen the original film. Jai and Omi spot a pretty girl in the neighbourhood (Tapsee Pannu). The bumbling fools try their luck with her and fail. The girl Seema falls for Sid. The two jealous friends now try to bust the love story.
Dhawans remake retains the basic storyline of the original and all that follows, with a few inclusions to make it whackier for GenNow tastes. The languid feel of Paranjpyes effort is traded for more energetic vibes but the humour often seems forced. The gags - many of them SMS jokes that might have popped into your inbox from time to time - are simply not funny enough even if you are game to grant the licence of brainlessness.
Dhawan has always been a master of spoofs, known especially for using hit songs to create humour out of situations that may come across as intense in an otherwise clichd potboiler. He taps the formula again in Chashme Baddoor, but his choice of songs - from the '80s and the '90s - seems a bit jaded.
A good part of the film has to be its dialogues. Sajid-Farhads lines, loaded with tapori shayari, do the trick, often taking otherwise lame scenes to another level.
Of the three leads, Siddharth as the filmy freak Jai outshines the others with his natural comic timing. The other winner is Rishi Kapoor as Mr Joseph. The character is an update on Saeed Jafferys friendly neighbourhood paanwallah Lallan Miyan in the 1981 flick. Unlike Jaffery, who had a cameo, Kapoors is a more fleshed-out supporting role. Joseph gets his quota of naach-gaana and a Miss Josephine (Lilette Dubey) too, to cover sizeable runtime. Tapsee Pannu tries cutting a picture of zest as Seema, but her role - like all the others in this film - is too flippant to let her impress.
There are two ways you would enjoy this film: Either you haven't seen the original, or if you are sporting enough not to compare.
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New Delhi: If you keep aside the fact that David Dhawan dared to remake a film that is considered a cult classic, 'Chashme Baddoor' can manage to tickle your funny bone.
While the maker completely rips of the innocence that was associated to the original film and infuses slapstick humour in huge dollops- the three lead actors- Ali Zafar, Divyendu Sharma and Siddharth manage to make you laugh and cringe at the same time.
So we had Divyendu Sharma playing Omi - a role that was perfected by Rakesh Bedi in the original, Siddharth repirsing Ravi Baswani's Jai and Ali zafar playing the good boy Siddharth, played by Farooq Shaikh in the original. While Zafar's character did not demand too much of theatrics, it is Sharma and Siddharth who surprised us all with their 'kamina' act.
With sound background in theatre and a degree in acting from FTII, Divyendu had already made everyone sit up and notice him in his first film 'Pyaar Ka Punchnama'. The earnestness with which Sharma had played the shy boy in love with his boss made everyone connect with him. Stark contrast to his portrayal of Liquid in PKP is the character Omi- a typical good for nothing fella' who makes shayari out of the most mundane things in day to day life. A relative newcomer amongst the cast of 'Chashme Baddoor ', Sharma surprisingly managed to make his presence felt with his over the top and dare-i- say cheap shayari.
The surprise package of the film is clearly actor Siddharth who makes an intentional shift from the kind of roles he has done in the past in Bollywood to play aspiring actor Jai. The first scene of the film where Siddharth pretends to rape a woman during a film's audition and goes over the top so much so that the heroine calls for help might make Siddharth loyalists cringe a bit. Simply because, the man who has done some really interesting roles in films like 'Boys', 'Rang De Basanti' and 'Striker' doesn't really go with the womaniser Jai's character. And that's perhaps why his performance stands out. In his mauve ganjis and bright pink boxers, Siddharth looks comfortable as the aspiring actor with a roving eye. 'Chashme Baddoor' also makes us realise that how the actor can do amazing mimicry of almost all the actors of Indian cinema. From Aamir Khan to Rajinikanth to even Amrish Puri, Siddharth switches to different actors effortlessly in almost all his dialogues and spoofs films and characters.
Both Divyendu and Siddharth have a sound background in theatre and manage to light up the screen even though they aren't the main leads. They are spontaneous and have a perfect comic timing and demand the viewer's attention whenever they are on screen.
And if not for the doing bad films with cheap humour, the two actors with an exceptional comic timing can easily be doing great stand up comedy. They both are a find. And make David Dhawan's otherwise poorly done 'Chashme Baddoor' an almost enjoyable film. Almost.
Chasme Bhaddoor First Day Business
Saturday 6th April 2013 10.00 IST | |
Boxofficeindia.Com Trade Network
Chasme Bhaddoor collected a decent 4.75 crore nett on its first day as the film put up good to decent figures in Delhi/UP, East Punjab, Gujarat, CI and Rajasthan. The collections were on the lower side in Eastern and Southern markets.
The film did much better at multiplexes than single screens as there was no face value for the single screen audience. The business in Delhi NCR and East Punjab was best with Delhi/UP going over 1 crore nett and East Punjab getting close to 50 lakhs.
The film should manage a healthy weekend as Saturday should show growth especially in multiplex dominated circuits. | |
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