Aiyyaa

Rating : 3/10
Release Date : 12th October, 2012
Time : 148 minutes
Director : Sachin Kundalkar; Writer : Anurag Kashyap; Music : Amit Trivedi
Starring : Rani Mukherjee, Prithviraj, Subodh Bhave, Nirmiti Sawant, Amey Wagh, Jyoti Subhash, Satish Alekar

Crass, loud, senseless. I cannot fathom how it came about. Am sure illegal substances were involved. Or a foreign conspiracy. I don’t think we have the imagination to be so bad by ourself.

The story is actually very simple. A ‘young’ (its Rani after all) Maharashtrian girl is looking to get married, is going through the whole arranged marriage scene with her family, eventually even meeting a nice guy (Subodh). Meanwhile, she develops the hots for a budding painter (Prithviraj) studying at the college where she works. Sounds fine ?

The makers now make every character weird (what was her grandmom smoking ?), throw in innumerable fantasy dance sequences (all featuring Rani and her battle against the bulge), ensure everyone dresses crazy (her fruit-cake co-worker takes the cake on this one), and ensure nothing makes any sense.

Just to give you a sample. The father repairs ancient phones and smokes four cigarettes at one go. The brother gives shelter to stray dogs and sleeps outside on a fortified bathtub. Her co-worker dresses, in one memorable instance, with just the yellow Police ‘Do Not Disturb’ duct tape wrapped around her and loses no opportunity to stand on top of a table and practice hitherto unseen Bollywood dance moves. The grandmother zips around on a motorized wheelchair and has more gold than calcium in her teeth. Prithviraj’s chest foliage is almost as dense as Anil Kapoor’s in most scenes, yet is miraculously gone for all his muscular item songs.

The plot stops making sense by the first twenty minutes. Lack of editing means the film stretches and stretches for a shuddering two and a half hours. And Rani’s determination to smell her way through life stinks big time.

In one of the scenes in the film, Rani goes to a drug dealer to attempt to buy some of his wares. She should’ve just gone within the film unit, am sure several of them were high on it while making this one.