A tacky dream merchant in Bollywood, played with a compassionate conviction by Govind Namdeo, comforts the wannabe, “Big stars don’t ensure success. Any film succeeds as long as people like it.”
This could well be a comment on what debutant Chandan Arora has attempted to do in his minty maiden emotion picture. There’s so much heart in Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahta Hoon, we just want hold it close to ourselves and caress its warmly contagious contours.
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Why do those flickering images on screen sometimes begin to seem spitting images of everyday nightmares and dreams? Why do we want to admire some films from afar and hug some other films close to our hearts?
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This one easily falls into the cuddly category. While the other debutant director Robby Grewal’s film this week is icy cool in approach, debutant Chandan Arora (who has long served as Ram Gopal Varma’s editor and gets his first film cut by Amit Pawar with a knife’s precision) takes his film into a delightfully heartwarming territory where the smell of frying samosas in the gullies and mohallas wafts down from the screen and mingles with our popcorn.
The vibrant colours, the thundering thronging crowds, the rippling raunchy songs and quibbling paunchy touts….Main Madhuri… is an all-over-the-place film. So far-reaching are its colours smells and sounds that we never know when the story of little vulnerable Chutki starts and ends.
The playing time of this familiar-yet-invigorating film about the film- world moves at a brisk bubbly pace. Director Chandan Arora has a simple yet universal story of incommensurate ambitions to tell. Unlike Ram Gopal Varma’s Rangeela, which turned its wannashine protagonist Mili's story from the chawl to the movie mall into a tall fairytale, the story of Chutki never loses its vulnerability and believability. And it ends where it begins, thereby taking the protagonist and us, a full and satisfying circle.
Indeed, what touches most and deepest is the casting. None of the characters seem to be actors doing roles. They simply merge into the saturated frames, brimming over with flamboyant, often purposely gaudy colours that celebrate life and its vicissitudes at their most elemental level.
Enough has been said about Rajpal Yadav’s astonishingly unaffected screen presence. But still not enough. Yadav doesn’t just blend into the film’s fabric, he merges and melts into the jostling rustic and semi-rustic milieu, creating for himself the kind of place Dev Anand had created in Waheeda Rehman’s looming presence in Guide. The way Yadav’s character’s eyes shine each time Chutki is happy makes this film a perfect working class love story.
So flawlessly empathetic is Yadav in his role of Chutki’s mentor, guide and faithful companion that we are tempted to underestimate Antara Mali’s whispering, gasping interpretation of a wannashine’s dreamscape. Mali’s lack of overt glamour works to the character’s advantage. Each time she enacts one of Madhuri Dixit’s immortal song-and-dance numbers Mali's eyes shine with a life-giving energy. Raman Trika as the beefy struggler who “wants” Chutki (and not just on-camera) plays the cardboard character with a foamy flair.
Aptly, the supporting cast is shadowy, composed of a melee of sweaty anxious faces denoting the manageable chaos of Mumbai’s film studios. Director Chandan Arora knows this milieu and its inbuilt disillusionment only too well. He weaves a tale that’s direct, unadorned and vibrant. Arora is a welcome addition to the directorial brigade. Sanu John Varughese’s saturated cinematography fills the viewer’s eyes with gasping sighs.
The sounds and colours of Madhuri Dixit’s gyrating images come alive in Amar Mohile’s skilled sound design, which hovers comfortably between the two seemingly incompatible hemispheres of homage and spoof. It finally chooses to reside permanently in the land of homages.
Once again, Ram Gopal Varma takes you by surprise. None of his films so far have so much heart….And attitude. What better tribute could Madhuri Dixit hope for?