No Rom Little Com:
The sworn off marriage protagonist of this film declares that he is not husband or boyfriend material, but he can be ‘timepass’; unfortunately Nawazuddin Siddiqui is not romcom material either. It’s nothing to do with age or appearance, it’s just that even the best actors have their limitations. Siddiqui continues to give off gangsta vibes, even after playing a wide variety of roles on screen with remarkable skill.
The casting of two very unsuitable actors is the biggest shortcoming of Kushan Nandy’s Jogira Sara Ra Ra. Neha Sharma, the female lead, does not have the requisite cuteness to play the manic pixie dream girl, the slightly whacky but always endearing mainstay of romantic comedies. And the two, even going by the opposites attract rule have zero chemistry.
Jogi Pratap (Siddiqui) is a Lucknow wedding organiser, with a can-do jugaadu spirit that he always boasts of. But even he comes up short when he runs into tipsy gate crasher, Dimple Chaubey (Sharma).
Later, when he is hired to organise her wedding, she wants him to use his jugaad to break it up. She does not want to marry the overweight milquetoast Lallu (Mahaakshay Chakraborty) her parents have picked for her, mainly because no dowry has been demanded. If there is a tiny social comment about the sorry state of women in India, who are burdened with pernicious social customs, it is negated by Jogi’s reason for avoiding marriage—he has four sisters, a mother and an aunt at home, which, he says, is one too many “ladies.” The women are a screechy demanding lot, and not one of them does anything useful with her time. It’s not that Dimple has any ambitions either, she is okay with marriage and dowry, but just not with unsexy Lallu.
After all his schemes fail, Jogi stages a kidnapping, and hides Dimple in his own house, where the “ladies” take to her immediately. He does eventually succeed in getting the wedding cancelled, and Dimple is returned to her family, but getting her off his hands turns out to be tougher than he bargained for.
The local cops, Yadav and Yadav (Vishwanath Chatterjee, Ghanshyam Garg) are hand-in-glove with Chacha (Sanjay Mishra), the head of the Chaudhary gang, who kidnap for ransom and send over the cops their share. They refuse to believe Dimple was not kidnapped by Chacha or that no ransom was paid, and demand their cut.
The plot, that had some sparks of humour till this point, is totally derailed into unfunny absurdity, because Ghalib Asad Bhopali’s script runs out of workable tracks. If screwball comedy is so laborious, it loses its effect. The song-and-dance number in a brothel and Jogi pretending to have a “beemari” is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
The supporting actors like Sanjay Mishra and Rohit Chaudhary as a reformed gangster, throw in their effort and some of the amusing lines are delivered with the right degree of droll; surprisingly even Mahaakshay Chakraborty displays some comic chops. The film just works in fits and starts, and the viewer does not come out of the theatre smiling or humming, which is the mark of a successful romcom.
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)
