Runaway Bride:
The best thing about Kahan Shuru Kahan Khatam is its running time, which is less than two hours; while that is ideal for a romcom, this one looks like it was cobbled together from a first draft of the script.
Directed by Saurabh Dasgupta, written by Laxman Utekar and Rishi Virmani, it is set in a UP town, where a noisy wedding is underway. The bride’s father (Rajesh Sharma) is a mafia don, so the guests are, a voiceover informs, the who’s who of the crime world. They just look like extras dressed in second hand bling, and no costume changes over several days! Krish (Aashim Gulati) crashes into this melee, and even shakes a leg with the dancers—who have been placed in a cage to keep the drunks from pawing them. For Krishna, getting into strangers’ weddings is a hobby. He works as a teacher, which probably gives him the confidence to control unruly crowds, and, when the need arises, make feminist speeches in a place where the big ‘beti bachao beti padhao’ billboard is just for show. The women of the mansion all line up inside with faces covered in ghoonghats. The men swagger around flying high-tech drones.
The bride, Meera (Dhvani Bhanushali), educated in Australia, but unable to prevent an arranged marriage, escapes in a red car, right when someone notices the stranger running about in the haveli. Krishna gets into the car to avoid a beating or worse, and seeing them zoom off together, everybody thinks they have eloped. Meera’s father gives the order that nobody will leave the wedding venue till she is brought back, and the collection of gangsters meekly comply.
Meera’s brothers called Gautam and Gambhir to get a couple of easy laughs and a loitering thug called Baby are despatched to chase the runaway pair. For some reason, Krishna has two gay boys living in his house, who are also used as comic relief, because there aren’t too many pegs to hang humour on when armed goons and cops are in pursuit.
In Krishna’s family home in Barsana, his father (Rakesh Bedi) is a mild-mannered pandit, but his mother (Supriya Pilgaonkar) has a small army of lathi-wielding women; there is also a tech-savvy grandmother around—the idea being to contrast the two cultures in the same region, one in which women are silenced, and the other in which they are strong and independent. Incidentally, Barsana is a pilgrim town, famous as the birthplace of Radha and its unique tradition of lathmaar Holi, when women are permitted to thrash the men on that one day; whether the women go about with lathis all the time is debatable.
That the embedded patriarchy of Meera’s family will come in for a drubbing is inevitable—all it takes are a few speeches with public service ad kind of content, and the men are reformed!
There is no denying that in many pockets of India, women are oppressed, but as far as cinema is concerned, the messaging has gone beyond simplistic sloganeering; Utekar’s own films like Luka Chhupi and Zara Hatke Zara Bachke have crossed the basic alphabet of progressivism.
The actors do as well as they can with the limited material at hand—no stand out performance here, but Aashim Gulati has some comic chops, which will possibly be sharpened in a better film. Kahan Shuru Kahan Khatam with its retro-inspired title song and background score, just tries too hard–both with the comedy and the message.
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)
