Ayushmann Khurrana acts with his hands, his eyes, his entire being. In Rohan Sippy’s Nautanki Saala, he plays Ram Parmar (aka RP), the director and lead actor of a smash-hit stage show named Raavanleela. (It seems to be scored, rather oddly, to Mussorgsky’s Night on Bare Mountain.) Khurrana is the least interesting while on stage, where he’s declaiming lines – and anyway, the film is more concerned about his life offstage. In one of these moments, at a restaurant, RP finds himself having to walk up to a perfect stranger and pretend to know him enough to engage in a casual conversation. Khurrana’s timing is exquisite. He hams it up just enough to let us in on the joke, so that we’re laughing with him, at the victim of this joke (and also at RP’s situation). Later, at a hairdresser’s, he describes how the woman he’s fallen for does up her hair. Looking at his hands move and listening to him, we can almost picture her the way he does.
The character of RP is what they call an actor’s showcase, but not in the typical sense. There’s no extravagant histrionic possibility rising from a having to portray a disability or being beset by great tragedies. RP needs to be played as a normal guy, but with a touch of the manic – befitting his theatrical profession, there’s always some drama in his life – and Khurrana plays him beautifully. There are scenes requiring deft physical comedy. There are scenes, like the one involving a letter being read out with improvised contents, that need a kind of touch-and-go rhythm in the dialogue delivery. There are scenes built around a combination of both, like the one where RP resorts to mime in order to prompt an audition candidate who keeps forgetting his lines. (In a charades contest, you want RP on your team.) Khurrana makes everything look so effortless that he hardly seems to be acting. He seems to be doing something that’s simply an extension of his personality.
We could tire of this quickly if he keeps doing the same things, picking the same kind of parts – but at this stage of his career, he’s a joy. From the moment we first see him, clutching a teddy bear, his feet snuggled in fluffy slippers shaped like Angry Birds, Khurrana draws us into the film. He keeps us watching. And Nautanki Saala needs the infusion of energy an actor like Khurrana can provide, because without him there’s nothing. (Well, there’s a promising bit about a Malayali hospital worker who has framed photographs of Mammooty and Mohanlal on her desk and who speaks Hindi so rapidly that she needs a translator, but it’s never really developed.) This film left me quite frustrated because I really wanted to like it. There’s so much good taste, so much evidence of high-mindedness, of wanting to do something different, without taking the easy way out – these aspects may remind you of Sujoy Ghosh’s Home Delivery – that when something like this doesn’t work we feel more for the filmmakers than we do for ourselves, as we would in the case of a lazily made film.
The opening credits inform us that Nautanki Saala is based on the French film Après Vous, and the plot is something like this. RP prevents Mandar (Kunaal Roy Kapur) from going ahead with his suicide plan, and he then takes responsibility for picking up the threads of this stranger’s broken life – by trying to reunite Mandar with his ex, Nandini (Pooja Salvi), and by casting him in the all-important part of Ram in his play. (This man, naturally, knows nothing about the theatre.) I haven’t seen the French film, but looking it up, I saw that it was set in a restaurant. The protagonist is the maitre d’ and he gives the man whose life he’s saved the job of a sommelier. (This man, naturally, knows nothing about wine.) This somehow seems a more plausible set of circumstances – it’s easier to believe that someone can fake it with wines (even if it is Paris) than in front of an unpredictable live audience. Nautanki Saala is based on the premise that the actor-director of a hugely successful show would risk jeopardising his career in order to help a stranger he feels responsible for. I didn’t buy it for a second.
Mandar is the world’s biggest baby, constantly whining for attention. Even when he’s in the hospital and RP is applying some kind of salve on his posterior, he wants more. “Meri ek help karoge?” he asks RP, as if massaging the exposed buttocks of a strange man isn’t help enough. How can anyone see this bumbling, self-pitying loser as someone who belongs on the stage? Kapur plays this character as well as one could, but Mandar is like a lead balloon – he weighs down RP’s life and he weighs the film down. The strangeness of the premise might not have been such a problem if the gags kept coming. But Sippy tries to do too much. He layers his comedy with arch conceits, like the constant allusions to “nautanki” whenever something ultra-dramatic is about to occur, or the attempts to mirror the Ramayana unfolding on stage in the events of RP’s life. (RP’s falling for Nandini is compared to Sita’s apaharan; the Hanuman-equivalent character delivers a signet ring, and so forth.)
And so we discover that there’s a reason the protagonist is named Ram. He may play Raavan on stage and even adorn the steering wheel of his SUV with stickers of ten heads, but at heart he wants to play God. He does that in the theatre, as a director, and now he wants to do direct Mandar’s life. This is too much metaphorical weight for a farcical comedy, and Nautanki Saala fulfills neither promise – it’s not funny enough, and it’s not deep enough. (The rom-com contrivances towards the end don’t work either, and going by this film, apparently anyone can perform on stage.) The quirky and eclectic soundtrack helps – a remix of So gaya yeh jahaan that sounds like something dreamed up by a DJ in an Egyptian nightclub; a commenting-on-the-happenings track, Dil ki to lag gayi, that’s infused with a sultry, made-in-France vibe – but not nearly enough to make us forget that the cheeky title promised us a much funnier film.
Copyright ©2013 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.
Nidhi
April 13, 2013
I went in really hoping to like it. But sigh! It’s missed opportunities like this that disappoint me more than films that don’t raise my expectations in the first place.
Every bit you wrote about Ayushmann Khurana is so right, BR. Here he pulls off scenes that shouldn’t have worked in the first place (like the scene where he gets drunk, wears a wig of dreadlocks and refuses to go on stage). I hope he picks dramatic roles in the future but it’s clear he is an excellent comic actor. That’s not a bad thing at all. There aren’t many leading men in Bollywood who can do comedy this well.
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Shankar
April 13, 2013
Baddy, you mentioned you watched Annayum Rasoolum…can you write a little bit about that, maybe a bitty?
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Jerina
April 13, 2013
Too bad this movie wasn’t up to expectations. I was really rooting for it. Well, shall catch it on TV sometime.
Seems like Ayushmann has a flair for comedy. In Vicky Donor I felt he was not his best in scenes that needed more emotions, and it was Yami Gautam who emoted well in scenes depicting their misunderstanding and stuff. Anyway, as you said, he is new and can take the chance, before people try stereotyping him.
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Kutty
April 14, 2013
Bang on about Ayushmann. That curvy motion to describe Nandini’s hair was simply OMG stuff. I for one thought that Rohan Sippy handled that Ram-Raavan transformations quite well. To think about it, it is like the most non-serious way in which you can tell the audience that there is a bit of Ram and Raavan in all of us. That Raavan is not necessarily the bad guy or that Ram is the good guy. Agreed that the on-stage scenes were a drag, but then also believe that Rohan Sippy used the premise to good effect, milking it for comedy in most places and for staging the song sequences. Ayushmann now joins Ranbir as the men whose movies are a must try in the near future. Been long since there have been such a natural duo of actors came up in Bollywood (not to say Kolly is faring any better).
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Olemisstarana
April 14, 2013
Ah, BR – I did not know of this movie and then I read the beginning of your review, and then I did and I saw the trailer and I laughed out loud (like actually, I scared my hapless cat into slinking away), and then I finished reading the review and was sad… I believe the sole reason why I am commenting right now is because I wanted to gently point out that the art of crafting the perfect trailer is so under-appreciated. I thought this was a pretty good one – I had a vague idea of the story but didn’t get everything from it, and I laughed. Though I wonder if all the good gags were used up in the trailer.
Thanks for your words, I always enjoy reading the reviews.
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Nikhil R
April 14, 2013
Did not understand why anyone, let alone three guys (including Loli) would be hankering after the ‘Nandini’ character. Irritating as the character was, it could at least have been played a bit better. Pooja Salvi looked totally out of her depth. But the funny bits were pretty good. And I second the request to write about ‘Annayum Rasoolum’ (assuming you have seen it).
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SN
April 15, 2013
Saw the movie – went to it really wanting to like it and hoping that Ayushmann wd get a great second movie… Maybe too much to expect and it was a big disappointment I must say. After watching this movie realised how big a contributor Annu Kapoor was to making Vicky Donor what it was. Even though Ayushmann was good in that movie, in this movie, with almost all the supporting cast being totally useless (except Sulbha Arya in her 5 min appearance and the 2 South Indian receptionists at the hospital). I cd not for the life of me figure out how Nandini ended up with Mandar in teh first place and why all these guys wd be runnign after her also – she was such a disappointment. Even with so much screen time devoted to Mandar, I really cd not understand what he was about – maybe it was the actor portraying him, who I for a second did not feel worth a cent (for e.g. he did not make any effort to speak with a Marathi accent although he used exclamations in that language all the time when he was flustered – I wd have thought a guy like that wd speak in a heavy accent or at least a mild one)… So I felt it was Ayushmann who was let down by everyone around him. I saw Chashme Baddoor as well over the weekend and I went there thinking I wd definitely not like it but I must say that was the opposite in some sense, where all the supporting cast were so good that they made up for all the shortcomings of the main guy (Ali Zafar) – and I really liked that one…
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vinjk
April 16, 2013
I second Shankar and Nikhil’s request for a review on Annayum Rasoolum
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brangan
April 18, 2013
Kutty: I agree that the Ram-Raavan stuff was reasonably well thought out. But it just didn’t fit. At times, the meta elements seemed like a separate track.
Olemisstarana: Speaking of well-crafted trailer, I though this one for “Man of Steel” was especially good, considering that the trailers for these big-budget films all look the same and usually focus on just the money shots. The Krypton beginnings, his earthly early-days, his grown-up quest… the mini-narrative is solid. (And can’t wait to see Kevin Costner in this one, one of my favourite actors ever.)
SN: That thing about Marathi exclamations without an actual Marathi accent isn’t anything new. We’ve seen it before. I generally find this less distracting than people speaking accented Hindi (or Tamil or whatever) — where sometimes the accent is so strange that you wish they spoke in their original language. Of course,t his would require subtitles and there are commercial considerations that say you can’t have too many subtitles, but…
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SN
April 19, 2013
I mentioned that part abt the Marathi accent because I was thinking back to Abhay Deol in Shanghai where he made an effort to bring a South Indian twang into his Hindi. I am a South Indian who grew up in North India, so you wd not know I was a South Indian by my Hindi but it was great to see him make that effort (and the director insisting on it, I guess). In this movie, the Mandar guy spoke these Marathi exclamations every once in a while as if they were natural (for e.g. when he remembers suddenly abt the letter he has sent to his grand-ma, he does not do an english exclamation but he says Ajji-go if I remember right – that to me suggests that this is a guy who “thinks” in Marathi, and if that is the case, he shd be speaking Hindi in a Marathi accent). Just something that suggested to me that the actor was lazy (or the director did not bother) and in any case, I felt that he was just not up to it… Like most of the support cast, who were just abt adequate or less, which dragged the whole movie down. I single out the Mandar character because he is central to the story. Of course your point on accents is well made – I have a big problem nowadays understanding songs that are almost fully in Punjabi, where I dont understand a word! BTW, that Commando review was the most hilarious piece of writing I have seen in a long long time!
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