Brave attempt but fails to deliver on its promise
BATTI GUL METER CHALU
Direction: Shree Narayan Singh Actors: Shahid Kapoor, Shraddha Kapoor, Yami Gautam
Rating:
The film opens on an archery competition being held in a small town in Uttarakhand — at night. The person who hits the bull’s eye wins enough fuel to keep the neighbourhood community centre’s generator thumping for six months.
Batti Gul Meter Chalu is meant to shock. It’s a brave attempt by Director Shree Narayan Singh.
However, before you get to all that, you must wade through an interminable first half that focuses on a love triangle (Shahid Kapoor-Shraddha Kapoor-Divyendu Sharma), complete with dance sequences and songs that go ‘When you getting’ gold, why go for tamba; when you getting Gabbar, why go for Samba’.
Shahid is SK, a crafty lawyer who will gleefully break the law to earn an extra penny. Divyendu is his straight-as-an-arrow friend, Tripathi. Shraddha is Lalita Nautiyal, an aspiring designer with a grotesque fashion sense. The three have been bud- dies since childhood. Now, Lalita is looking for a husband and has decided to choose between the two. To help herself decide, she dates both for a week. This causes friction in the friendships. It’s a hare-brained plot, this bit.
More than an hour into the film, power cuts and inflated bulbs are still just a minor inconvenience. It becomes hard to pay attention. Post interval, a suicide shifts things into a different gear. Conscience calls upon SK and he decides to take on the corporate suits. Suddenly, from a muddled romance, we’re thrown into a courtroom drama / social commentary. Shahid hits his stride. Singh pulls no punches either.
Sadly, heavy-handed treatment and clunky execution let this half of the film down too. The speeches in the courtroom ramble on for so long, and state the obvious so many times, that they undo any impact they might have had. It doesn’t help that Shahid takes sexist digs at the defence lawyer(playedbyYamiGautam).
Over 165 minutes long, the film is indulgent to an extreme. The local dialect, which started out impressing you with its authenticity, begins to grate.
Like the governments it criticises, Butti Gul Meter Chalu starts out with promise, but fails to deliver.