Thursday, Jul 02, 2015

The challenge about doing a wholesome comedy film in Bollywood is to be able to sound and look funny without looking ridiculous.

For that, one needs a strong story, a punchy script and brilliant actors with perfect comic timings who execute the director’s vision with perfection. The new situational comedy released in the UAE on Thursday, Guddu Rangeela, produced by Fox Star Studios, has all the ingredients with Arshad Warsi, Amit Sadh and Aditi Rao Hydari in dream roles whipping up a laugh riot in a typical Subhash Kapoor film.

Kapoor, the winner of two national awards for his film Jolly LLB and the next director for the third sequel in the Munnabhai enterprise, has multi-tasked, wearing different hats of director, story, script and lyrics writer and also partnered with music director Amit Trivedi in providing a musical score of the movie.

Kapoor seems to have hit upon a perfect recipe for success with love, intrigue, kidnap and a social message all conveyed with a humourous punch in his trademark style.

Set in a small town of Northern India where crime lords rule the roost, the film focuses on the shenanigans of two lovable ruffians, Guddu (Amit Sadh) and Rangeela (Arshad Warsi). Their exploits bring them to open confrontation with criminal war lords and the law, and eventually they manage to get into a situation where they kidnap a hearing and speech impaired woman, Baby (Aditi Rao Hydari) who has a mysterious part and manages to say much with her large expressive eyes.

The film has a subplot based on the famous Manoj and Babli honour killing where the khap panchayat (kangaroo court) members were convicted for the first time and sentenced in a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court of India.

“It’s very difficult to have a social message in a film of the comedy genre. Very few people can do it,” said Arshad Warsi, the lead in the film who immortalised the dedicated, loyal, funny and lovable gangster’s side kick in his role of Circuit in the Munnabhai films. “I credit Subhash Kapoor and Raju Hirani who are the only two directors who have somehow managed to crack this in their movies. Guddu Rangeela is a movie with a strong story line and a humorous take and delivers a social message without being preachy. Amit has executed his part with good comic timing and Aditi has done a great job too,” said Warsi.

Aditi Rao Hydari who plays the hearing and speech impaired girl Baby did not have any lines but felt her role gave her tremendous potential to assert her acting skills. “I am nervous but very excited about this film, which has a super script and gave me a role that made me equal to the boys in the movie. Baby the character I play has a mysterious past and has this wall around her where she never lets anyone into her soul. She is a determined, no-nonsense girl who does a lot of talking with her eyes and the moment the two ruffians Guddu and Rangeela decide to kidnap her, she effects a change.”

Hydari said this was one of her most memorable roles and credits Kapoor for being an exacting director who is able to extract the best from his actors. “The reason why people love to see a Subhash Kapoor film is because his movies are not just projects but strong content driven stories that he is passionate about. It is real cinema with storytelling done with loads of humour. I hope people have as much fun watching it as I had doing this movie.”

As a parting shot Warsi had only one thing to tell his audience: “I usually hate promoting my films. The only reason I am doing this is to tell the audience that it is damn good film that you should not miss.”

Funny moments

The humour of the movie rubbed off on Hydari who turned into a prankster on the set, pulling off real life stunts on the unsuspecting Sadh. “I had a great time on the sets and enjoyed a riotous relationship with my fellow actors. We shot on location in Satara in a stone quarry where there was lots of mud flying and nothing much to do in between shots. One day, I walked to Amit’s room and was surprised to see the door wide open. Arshad and he had gone out and I wacked his laptop, his bicycle which he is obsessed about and when he returned he simply went bananas. When I called him to my room and told him I had played a prank, we had a good laugh about it.”

Mata Ka Email

The first song of the movie which was released recently, Mata Ka Email, has gone viral with the younger generation and is a funny take on the pop piety of people who make a song and dance about their love for the deity. The song rendered in typical foot tapping folk, is a spoof on wakes that people organise in India in honour of Goddess Vishno Devi. Here the modern day deity is said to have website, calls people on facebook and sends emails to her devotees. The lyrics are bound to make you smile at the hypocrisy of the commercialism that has inadvertently creeped into to the ‘faux pious’ culture sweeping cities of India.

By Suchitra Bajpai Chaudhary, Senior Reporter

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