Cast: Rishi Kapoor, Ayushmann Khurrana, Sonam Kapoor
Director: Nupur Asthana
Rating: Three and a Half Stars
Sometimes, love just ain't enough. So there we have two people in love.
The pampered but not spoilt bureaucrat's daughter Mayera and her lover
beau Mohit whose upward mobility is frozen by an employment meltdown in
his airline organization (spicy allusion to the Kingfisher crisis, yes?)
It's Delhi's noveau riche Gurgaon world bathed in cosmetic conceit.
Sonam Kapoor and Ayushmann Khurrana blend into this gleaming kingdom's
excesses effortlessly. The two of them are so good as a couple,
imagining them apart for even a portion of the bitterness that bites
into the narrative during the second-half becomes unbearable.
Debutant director Nupur Asthana's film is a bright scrambled world of
wealth, luxury and the yuppy club's unstated desperation to move up the
corporate ladder. It is also, by its very definition, a ridiculously
self-important delusional world.
Miraculously this film with its gleaming polished surfaces neither
gasps nor laughs at the ignobility of upward mobility. There is an
interestingly crafted fight scene between the film's lead pair where
Mayera reminds Mohit that she has not bought a new pair of shoes during
the last two months because of his job loss. That she doesn’t realize
how ridiculous she sounds to Mohit is a measure of the underlining irony
that the narrative scrapes out of these characters while portraying the
exacerbated materialism of the go-getting generation.
Habib Faisal's writing is smart and amiable, crowded with quaint
colloquialisms culled from the capital youngster's language. The writing
also surprises itself by becoming inwardly-drawn and introspective at
the most unexpected moments. That the screenplay has got Ayushmann to
play the cool guy whose perfectly laid-out plans fall apart, is a stroke
of luck for this likeable film.
Ayushmann looks like the guy next-door who wouldn’t mind pulling a few
strings to float higher than the level allotted to him by fate. He
brings a suave arrogance to his role and creates a cohesive graph for
his character. He is an actor to watch.
Of course it helps Ayushmann that he has Rishi Kapoor to play his
girlfriend's hawk-like father. Rishi’s character of the IAS officer on
the verge of retirement (with a companion from his work place who
typically, offers his "humble" advice on every matter) is brilliantly
written.
Rishi's Sehgal is a pompous name-thrower with an inflated sense of
self-worth, over-possessive about his only daughter's life and
preferences. V.K. Sehgal is a striking image of a man on the verge of
erupting into a self-deprecatory laughter, if he only he knew how funny
his quirks look from the outside.
Rishi brings to the characters a cornocupia of "cool". Seldom in his any other recent film except
Do Dooni Chaar has
this brilliant actor expressed such pleasure in putting forward his
character’s point of view. It’s no coincidence that film too was written
by Faisal.
So many of Rishi Kapoor’s scenes with Ayushmann stand tall because of
the way the two characters meet as adversaries who fortunately love the
same girl in different ways. Sonam as the girl torn between an
autocratic dad and unreasonable lover is so in-character you wonder
whether the role and its fetish for designer labels were written
specially for her.
Bewakoofiyan has nothing new to say. And that is its greatest virtue. It is
Meet The Parents where
the father and the prospective son-in-law's roles are better played
than the original. Yes, Rishi and Ayushmann are better than Robert de
Niro and Ben Stiller were in the Hollywood film about the father of the
bride.
The narrative sparkles with a mischievous elegance. The winking homage
to the go-getting glam-set of Delhi works mainly because the three
protagonists are so immersed in the goings-on they make us forget that
we've seen most of these conflicts over and over again in the past. In
terms of the fluency with which the cliche about the love birds and the
girl's disapproving dad is tackled,
Bewakoofiyaan is a marked improvement on Yashraj Productions' last two pretentious hammy films
Shuddh Desi Romance and
Gunday.
Ayushmann's performance is oh not so hammy. A pure delight to behold
after Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor's over-energized bravado in
Gunday.
