When Ishqiya‘s trailer came out in October last year, I got hooked, just in one go. It was clearly one the best trailers I’d seen in a long time! So today was the D-Day, the star studded premier of the movie, and I was lucky enough to get the passes.
Well, I’ll try to keep it simple and write what was my opinion. First of all, I thought it was a great ensemble of artists, from Naseeruddin Shah Sahab (Khalujaan) to Vidya Balan (Krishna Verma), Arshad Warsi (Babban Hussain) and of course, Vishal Bharadwaj, even though he wasn’t the director, yet you could make out it was his writing, it had his “essence”. This was Abhishek Chaubey‘s debut movie as a director, before this he wrote screenplay for Vishal Bharadwaj‘s earlier movies like Kaminey, Omakara etc. so probably that too justifies the “essence” I mentioned above.
Even though it was an ensemble of one of my all time favorite artists, unfortunately the movie didn’t work for me, and I’m all heartbroken writing this. I really had high expectations from it, but the whole storytelling went haywire. Half way through the movie I was looking for pieces of puzzle to put together, just so it could justify what was happening on the screen. First half was somewhat an intro, with hilarious dialogues, which is how most movies are. But, the main story and confusion began in the second half when things started to converge. Instead of converging at one point, the stories started to overlap each other. What could have been a great story, became complex for no apparent reason, plus there were some glitches in the movie, the kind of glitches I didn’t expect this movie to have. After the movie, there was small session with the entire cast of the movie, where Vishal Bharadwaj mentioned that this project was being worked on for over 2 years. Well whenever that happens, either we a get Great story or a Confused story. That’s probably what happened with Ishqiya, and when the movie was about to end, in my mind an episode of Entourage was running, because of the similarities. The one where Meddellin premiers at Cannes Film Festival and people walk in with big expectations post all the hype, and come out disappointed, but here people seemed to like it, or at least they said so. The freaky part: Abhishek Chaubey does resemble Billy Walsh (Character in Entourage, played director of the movie Meddellin) .
Anyway, back to the story, movie has been set in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, which happens to have the perfect small town feel to it. Like Vishal Bharadwaj‘s previous movies this too has the raw earthy feel to it, be it the accent, locations, dialogues, everything. Other than the story, what did work perfectly, were the performances, the three in lead were undoubtedly brilliant, but special mention to Alok Kumar, the kid who played Nandu, and Rajesh Sharma, owner of the KK Steel Co. (You might remember him as Munjal from Khosla Ka Ghosla), even though small roles they did deliver perfectly. However, it was really hard to catch Salman Shahid‘s dialogues (Mushtaq – Brother in law of Khalujaan), because of the accent he had in the movie.
-Tiny spoiler-
Apart from great performances, do look out for a passionate kiss between Arshad Warsi and Vidya Balan, well I’m mentioning this because I have NEVER seen such a kiss before in ANY Indian movie. I don’t know how elder people watching the movie took it, but I certainly found it as a sign that Filmmakers have started showing intimate scenes like they happen in real life, but not throw in just for the sake of showing it. Also, make sure you watch the movie without any distractions, because there are some really hilarious dialogues and strong language (read curses) in the movie which you might miss out if you don’t pay attention, and yeah, super songs as well.
Even though the movie fails in storytelling, watch it for the performances and dialogues, sheer brilliant. I still feel sorry, had so wished for the movie to be great. But yeah, one thing is certain; director Abhishek Chaubey has great potential.
P.S. Special thanks to my good friend Priya Mishra, for the passes.
Rating: 2.5/5
Year: 2010