|
You have to be
there to see how big a small towner's dream is. Unlike the other recent big film
"Bunty Aur Babli" about small-town dreams, "Main Meri Patni Aur Who" isn't about
getting away, or getting there. It's just about getting even with life without
losing one's cool.
Set in Lucknow, and capturing the city in its normal undramatic rhythms
of everyday life (the small-town Uttar Pradesh ambience was earlier imaged with
intrinsic intimacy in Tigmanshu Dhulia's "Haasil"), "Main Meri Patni..."
is remarkably attuned to the tenor of normalcy. Even when drama beckons, the
narrative chooses to stay away.
If you have had enough of Mumbai as seen through the hazy lens of exacerbated
glamour and gangsterism, then here's a rare chance to escape into the virtues of
the basic simplicity of existence, lost to Hindi cinema in the nervous scamper
to create larger-than-life images.
Director Chandan Arora, who earlier styled the brackish
small-town-wannabe-girl's adventures in Bollywood ("Main Madhuri Dixit Banna
Chahti Hoon"), is here on much firmer ground.
Arora's grasp over the grammar of the north Indian middleclass comes across in
vivid and often savagely funny details from his protagonist Mithilesh's daily
routine. The stopwatch scooter ride to his place of work, the little quirks and
foibles that make Mithilesh so endearingly emblematic of non-metropolitan
existence, are chalked out in a vivid landscape of sharply drawn images and
words.
Jehangir Chowdhary's cinematography and Pankaj Saraswat's dialogues are tangy
and piercing.
In the way the camera and the dialogues manoeuvre through the evenly paced
narrative, you can almost smell the breath of Lucknow's decadent modernity.
With rationed nostalgia, the director derives inspiration from Basu
Chatterjee's "Rajnigandha" to create a disarming metaphor of the common
man's insecurities. Rajpal Yadav as the librarian with a complex about
his height could be Amol Palekar in Chatterjee's film 30 years ago,
wooing Vidya Sinha away from the master-manoeuvrer Dinesh Thakur.
Rajpal's nagging insecurities about his pretty tall wife and the male attention
that he thinks she unnecessarily attracts are never turned into pretexts for
titillation.
This must be the only sex comedy in the history of Indian cinema that steers
clear of the bed. Instead, Arora chooses to dwell in his protagonist's head,
creating a wonderful fusion of feeling and fantasy without ever digressing from
the chosen path of reality.
We see Mithilesh's domestic domain and spousal reality as he sees it. The
wife, in fact, is imagined almost entirely from the outside. Benign and
sweet-tempered, oblivious to the demons that plague her husband...until the
intelligently staged outburst towards the end.
It's an encouraging comeback to Hindi cinema for Rituparna Sengupta.
She's different, quietly graceful and confident in a film that belongs almost
entirely to her co-star.
Rajpal Yadav in his author-backed tailor-made role holds back his strange range,
uses his histrionic ammunition to fuel rather than fatten the character. Curbed
and controlled, he shows some of our matinee idols what getting into a character
means. His climactic rooftop sequence with his wife, where he asks her
forgiveness, is so heart-warming it almost redefines screen heroism.
The supporting cast, particularly Kay Kay Menon as the man of the world,
Varun Bandola as Mithilesh's boisterous buddy and Vinod Nagpal as the
uncle, add an authentic lustre to this mellow marital drama, steeped in the
ethos of fluid authenticity.
The music (Sanjay Jaipurwale) is incidental but finely tuned to the pitch
and ambience of the narrative.
What remains with you is the benignity and sincerity of the presentation. You
can't but wish well for these characters. They are as guileless as the creators
of this film. |
