Silent Noise:
If a gimmick, like a silent movie, is to be used in a film today, the plot, situations and characters should justify it.
The noisy and chaotic Ufff Yeh Siyapaa, written and directed by Ashok G, makes one nostalgic for Pushpak (Singeetam Srinivasa Rao, 1987) and doubly appreciate the brilliance of The Artist (Michel Hazanavucius, 2011)
Kesarilal’s (Sohum Shah) constant ogling at the sexy (tight clothes, in-your-face yoga moves) neighbour Kamini (Nora Fatehi), leads to his wife, Pushpa (Nushratt Bharuccha) walking out with their young son. Left alone, moping in an untidy house, full of what look like horror props, Kesarilal is shocked to find a corpse behind his sofa, of a woman who resembles his wife. He believes he has accidentally stabbed her, so tries all kinds of desperate tricks to dispose of the body, and clean the flat of any possible evidence.
Meanwhile, a parcel is mistakenly delivered to Kesarilal’s address, which the criminals to whom it belongs try to retrieve. Hasmukh (Omkar Kapoor), a cop, with a Dabangg hangover , gets caught up in the drama, when Kamini calls him, with a really mute man (Sharib Hashmi) leading the cops to Kesarilal’s home. They find nothing there, but later, Hasmukh needs to dispose of another corpse, and between the cops, gangsters, Kesarilal, Kamini, and other assorted characters (one of them with a dental implement sticking of out his mouth!), there are a lot of stagey entries, exits and pratfalls all set in that apartment building, that looks like a school, and seems to have no other residents, except the Singh family and Kamini.
Without giving out spoilers there’s a lot of running about, bumping into things and people, hiding and peeking that involve identical suitcases, a crime that goes wrong due to the parcel delivery mix-up, and recreating the same sequence of events from different points of view. All of which is mostly tedious, sporadically amusing, and completely senseless.
The characters may not speak, but they overact, grimace, pull faces and make enough of a non-verbal “unhh unhh, aah aah” kind of racket, accompanied by AR Rahman’s weirdly cacophonous score.
The actors, even the usually dependable ones like Nushratt Bharuccha (she gets an inexplicable make-over in the second half) and Sharib Hashmi, look like they could do with some directorial control. Soham Shah has a challenging role, but his performance is strangely lackadaisical. When the goings-on are not engaging, the grungy interiors and general over-the-top antics just make it worse. Silent it may aim to be, but the film, unfortunately, is as headache-inducing as an out of tune brass band.
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)