Yes, the ladies take getting used to. Both Koel Purie and Tara Sharma with their affected Hindi accents aren’t the best people to be entrusted with roles as demanding as this. Though it must be said right here that they somewhat deliver. And they only pale in comparison to a seasoned Tisca Chopra.
It’s a large ensemble and the responsibilities for this romantic comedy version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream are equally divided between the three ladies and four gentlemen — Rajat Kapoor, Purab Kohli, Neil Bhoopalam and Manu Rishi. And it’s never easy to pull off what is essentially a stage play and turn it into cinema. Writer-director Sharat Katariya sticks to the basics — the writing and the performances. He manages to set a pretty nice mood with the music. And everything else is irrelevant here.
The film begins on the eve of a wedding as we meet the primary players. The bride (Tara Sharma) who plans to elope with her timid church-musician boyfriend (Neil Bhoopalam), the groom (Purab Kohli) who has just spent the night with his lover and best friend (Koel Purie), the mehndi artist (Tisca Chopra) who is constantly followed by her ever-suspicious insecure husband (Rajat Kapoor), a herbal potion vendor and a motley crew of ragtag actors (Brijendra Kala, Manurishi Chaddha among others) trying to rehearse for their amateur staging of the Ramayana . As the characters decide to go get the love of their life during the wedding, a magic love potion thrown into the mix, turns it into a comedy of err... poetic justice.
It’s always a tricky to bring in an element of the supernatural and the portion after the love potion kicks in, is the film’s most weakly staged sequence. The men go chasing the same girl, profess their love for her as the other shrieks on annoyingly... it’s all so loud and theatrical and as funny as the situational comedy is, you wonder what a better cast and experienced director could have done with this material.
But that’s a rather small bone to pick given that this very set of actors perform with decent comic timing otherwise. Rajat Kapoor and Tisca Chopra, are the best and the most natural, of the lot. And their story works a little better than the others.
The film makes up for all its limitations with a lot of fun and its crisp 90-minute length.
With Khiladi 786 being the other film to have released this week, it’s pretty much a no-brainer.
