Great performers turned into caricatures
LUKA CHUPPI Direction: Laxman Utekar Actors: Kartik Aaryan, Kriti Sanon, Aparshakti Khurana, Pankaj Tripathi Rating:
There is something about Pankaj Tripathi. His presence in a film, web series, advertisement, music video or juice stall poster makes you believe that whatever it is will be good. You want to order that glass of mixedfruit juice because you believe it will be a more honest glass of juice. You hope that political parties don’t find out about this superpower because who knows what might happen then.
Luka Chuppi takes Pankaj Tripathi, dresses him in red trousers, a yellow shirt and green sunglasses, saddles him with a clichéd role and lines that make you want to give up — and he still manages to carry it off.
And therein lies the problem with this film — it takes good material and excellent performers and turns them into caricatures. Sure, it has its moments, and the second half is largely enjoyable, but you have to wait for the fun. After a slew of excellent small-town dramas, expectations are high and patience thin. Director Laxman Utekar ought to have accounted for that.
At the heart of the story is moral policing in India and the refusal of our self-appointed moral guardians to allow any kind of sexual agency to the young. An actor named Nazeem Khan (Abhinav Shukla) becomes enemy number one of the Sanskriti Raksha Manch after he acknowledges his live-in relationship. They can’t attack him, so they do the next best thing — attack defenceless lovers in the bylanes of Mathura.
Heading this organisation is Vishnu Trivedi (Vinay Pathak), who’s hoping that his grandstanding will win him an upcoming election. His daughter Rashmi (Kriti Sanon) has recently returned home to Mathura after a journalism course in Delhi. And finds a job working alongside the star of a local news channel, a spiked-haired dude named Guddu (Kartik Aaryan). They scour Mathura talking to people on the subject of live-in relationships; the best comments come where we least expect them. And then, of course, love blossoms. Guddu is all set for the saat pheras, but Rashmi wants (wouldn’t you know it) to live together first.
They head to Gwalior on the pretext of a journalism project and rent an apartment. But Guddu’s meddlesome relative, Babulal (Pankaj Tripathi), finds his love nest and brings the entire family to it. A quicklymade-up tale of the two being married spirals out of control as Rashmi’s father gets involved. The two find themselves living in Guddu’s family home as a married couple without ever having exchanged vows.
After a staid first half, the second lifts off as the ensemble cast gets a bigger role to play and the narrative moves away from the love story to various aborted attempts on the part of the couple, to get married. Kartik is good as the small-town boy caught in a mess not of his making. Kriti is believable as the smalltown girl gone urbane.
Best of all, the hypocrisy of vigilante justice in the name of ‘saving sanskriti’ is called out. “Yeh dharm nahi hai, mudda hai chunaav ke liye,” goes one line. An extra half star, just for that