Criminally repetitive

JUL 09 -
The crime-caper comedy is a well-mined vein in cinema, and most of us will no doubt be familiar with the ropes. Usually replete with semi-idiotic but overall loveable crooks in possession of more ambition than brains, these film s mostly revolve around the cumbersome planning, executing, and general bungling up of high-stake heists. Throw a bit of retrograde amnesia into the mix and you have the bones of Raj Kumar Gupta’s latest, Ghanchakkar. Although the film , starring Emraan Hashmi and Vidya Balan, takes its cue from the above-described premises, it does, however, come with a little catch: The heist isn’t the crux here, what happens after is. But as promising as Ghanchakkar might seem in its enthralling initial half, it peaks much too early, disintegrating slowly and torturously thereafter.

Sanjay and Neetu Athray (Hashmi and Balan) make up a young couple whose marriage is in a rut. Their lives are dictated by rigid pattern—he watches too much TV, she nags; her bizarro fashion sense (a cross between streetwalker and Hello Kitty) irks him constantly and he nags—to the point where dinner-time conversation and fights between them have taken on a déjà vu-esque quality. But the monotony is shattered when Sanjay is offered big money by two shysters, the always-smiling Pandit and rather unstable sidekick Idris (played by Rajesh Sharma and Namit Das), for his help in robbing a bank. Sanjay, we’re told, is handy with tools and something of a pro at this sort of thing, and his wife has long been egging him on to such lucrative pursuits. After some hemming and hawing over morality (hah!) he decides to take up the new job, one last time, before giving up the whole sordid business forever.

Famous last words.

The robbery itself proceeds fairly smoothly in what is one of the film ’s most entertaining, albeit a touch too prolonged, sequences. When the three finally manage to get the loot out, they decide that one of them should keep it safe for a few months to avoid rousing the authorities’ suspicions. Sanjay is given the responsibility based on the fact that he has the most to lose, what with a wife and all, and he reluctantly agrees.

Three months on and Pandit and Idris decide it’s time to claim their share of the money. But when they get in touch with Sanjay, he appears to have no recollection of the events of the night of the robbery, thanks to head trauma sustained in an alleged accident that has wiped out his memory. The cash is still at large, somewhere in the city, and everyone must now focus their energies in helping Sanjay remember where he hid it. So follows a complex and extremely repetitive treasure hunt set against an atmosphere of rapidly waning trust and punctuated by unexpected revelations, dead ends, and potential double-crosses.

Hashmi and Balan have a great rapport, already established to good effect in The Dirty Picture last year, and they bounce off each other just as comfortably in Ghanchakkar. And while I’ve never been a 100 percent on Hashmi’s acting skills—he’s not the most versatile of performers out there, let’s face it (although it works here in a role that necessitates a blank face most of the time)—Balan is expectedly incredible, investing the etiquette-devoid, headband-fetishising Punjabi housewife with convincing life and charming feistiness. Sharma and Das too work well as the couple’s counterparts in crime, although Das frequently veers into lewd caricature, exertions that can feel a little bit forced. But Sharma, as his unctuous superior, is spot on, not really surprising given the slew of diverse roles the actor has successfully taken on in the past few years (including, incidentally, a part in The Dirty Picture).

The problem with Ghanchakkar, then, has very little to do with the cast, and entirely to do with a script that appears to have been churned out with great enthusiasm at first, then finished off in a rush. Gupta, who previously directed the political crime thriller No One Killed Jessica, and who also wrote the script for Ghanchakkar alongside Parveez Shaikh, sets up the plot with admirable flair—it’s fast-paced, funny and engrossing, everything you want in a comedy—until he gets to the halfway mark and seemingly loses all perspective. Scenes are suddenly stretched to unnecessary lengths, the same jokes pressed upon us until they’ve wrung out every bit of humour, and the story growing more and more convoluted by the minute, staring down at a very unsatisfying climax. That downhill ride is made all the more disappointing by the sheer brilliance of the first half.

Ghanchakkar is an unfortunate misfire, a film that brings together so much talent, has all the makings of an edgy dark comedy, but isn’t able to drive it home. It’s not unwatchable by any means, of course, but if I were you, I’d wait to catch it on TV. After all, to see potential squandered the way it is here, the smaller the screen the better.

Labels: Entertainment, Highlight