Film: Ramaiya Vasta Vaiya
Starring: Girish Kumar,Shruti Hassan
Director: Prabhu Deva
Producer: Kumar Taurani
Banner: Tips Industries Limited
Music: Sachin-Jiga
"Maine Pyar Kiya", anyone? Yes,
Prabhudheva's film, designed to launch the producer's son in style, is a
quaint homage to old-fashioned love. The film offers a colourful palate
of visuals and emotions neatly and aesthetically packaged. The film is
shot by cinematographer Kiran Deohans to ensure the flamboyant feast of
flurry doesn't get garish.
Of course the aesthetics here are very
basic, very desi, very much in keeping with the those times when love
meant wallowing in cow dung in your beloved's backyard. The colours are
sprayed on to the frames to suggest that happiness is often related to
the environment that we inhabit. Everyone wears a lot of colours. The
saris are sequined and heavily embroidered. You can't miss the lavish
budget.
The young energetic hero's dad Randhir
Kapoor behaves as though he never grew up as he slipped into old age.
Randhir incidentally is in his element. He is wickedly tongue-in-cheek
with his screen son. He leaves us guessing whether he's laughing with or
at the goings-on. But poor Vinod Khanna. His role seems to have
bypassed Asrani.
And the plot? It subsumes emphatic
elements from the modern mythology of the joint family. A possessive
paternal brother (Sonu Sood, controlled and calm even when provoked by
the plot to go over the top) brings up his kid-sister Sona (Shruti
Haasan) with tender care.
A wedding, not hers... luckily not yet, changes everything.
During her best friend's wedding, Sona
meets "Australia-returned" Ram. And we all know the rest. It is not easy
to package the predictable patterns of a typical romance in ways that
seem different and dynamic.
Prabhudheva's assertive yet restrained
vision manages to instil a sense of freshness and warmth to the trite
often ridiculously anarchic proceedings. Imagine a wooden toy-horse
standing symbolically on the mantel as a sign of sibling love in this
day and age!
There are episodes in the romance that
leave us open-mouthed, not necessarily for their novelty-value. Take
this as an example: Aussie boy Ram emerges from the shower and
accidentally drops the towel in front of the village girl and then asks
in all seriousness, "I hope you didn't see anything."
The second-half shifts gears and we have
debutant Girish Kumar (ebullient and full of beans, so energetic you
want to ask him to slow down and take deep breaths) travelling from,
yes, Australia to his lady-love's village to win over her unrelenting
brother.
The thing about Prabhudheva's direction
is its high energy level. Here, he films sequences such as those showing
the ruralisation of the chee-chee NRI, in choreographic splendour with
the hero using an abundance of physical energy to convey his cultural
shock.
Girish Kumar's young-love act is akin to
Charlie Chaplin on steroids. Take that as you will. Shruti Haasan who
is painlashed in her other release "D Day" this week, is here required
to blink and act bewildered and lost in the world of the filthy dirty
uncivilized rich.
That brilliant Tamil actor Nasser (also
seen in "D Day") playing the party-pooper with a daughter who lusts
after Girish, hams it up shamelessly. But you can't really blame him.
This is a film where everyone enjoys hitting the higher notes and
toppling over the line of control.
It's a crazily cluttered world, that
somehow manages to be enjoyable. Filled with music (the "Jeene laga
hoon" track by Atif Aslam stands out) action sound of slurpy sensations
of crowded frames filled with food, feud, farce and fury that one
associates with the cinema of Manmohan Desai and Sooraj Bajratya.
Yes, Prabhudheva knows his audience. He
even shows up for an item song with Jacqueline Fernandes in the
second-half that turns out to be neither here nor there. This is a good
old fashioned sweet tender, funny heartwarming and engaging yarn spread
out in a sumptuous vegetarian thali.