-: Movie Review :-
🎬 GULABO SITABO (2020)
(Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the film was not released theatrically, but on Prime Video worldwide on 12 June 2020)
GULABO SITABO lacks the measured humour and fluid storytelling customarily associated with Shoojit Sircar and Juhi Chaturvedi. You don't switch off disappointed though: the faint pink of ancient buildings spill over the frames, Lucknow emanates as pure poetry with smoke and early morning alleys sprayed over the city, a phenomenal inventory of actors, nuanced, expressive and recognizably subtle, and the director's actor Mr. Bachchan, in one of his finest performances ever, bent and bending both in mind and body, stealing, plotting, farting, swearing and romanticizing over his wife's decrepit mansion.
Sircar upholds a very complex subject of property rights of heritage buildings, government interventions, tenant/landlord crises, serpentine laws inaccessible to out-lawed man, and yet the nostalgia, the irony, the poetic justice in the end, the tragedy of both the faltering poodles of fate do not reach us; it staggers and halts somewhere between grinning and wailing (and it's not the artistic choke I'm talking about).
It's a film dampened and lessened by ill-scripted dialogues, slow-paced repetitions, and an overused, predictable, unimaginative, overacted act from Ayushmann Khurrana (yes it's time we knock on his head), and as an expected outcome we have the hyped altercation between the two metaphorical puppeteers falling flat on its stomach.
And you won't be able to blink when the 85 year old sassy, quirky, badass Farrukh Jaffar is on screen, balancing the amnesiac act of recalling the Nehruvian days and hoodwinking her husband, a certain Mr. Bachchan.
A special mention to Srishti Shrivastava, who is tasty and alluring as anything as Guddo.
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