This is a sly, tongue firmly and stubbornly in cheek, cheeky, slick and chic comedy about a loser, or a panauti — a word that recurs ad nauseam in this glorious gasbag of giggles, winks, nudges and innuendos packaged with such polished panache that you don’t really care what the inter-relations in the parodic plot finally signify… Maybe they signify nothing more than a numbing but pleasantly diverting nothingness. But who the heck cares, as long as the tumble of confusions generates a hilarious havoc.
Housefull, as the title suggests, is chock-full of characters who bump into one another and into hard surfaces (including the unresolved edges in the plot) without injury. It’s all done in ricocheting rhythms of laughter that rises from the pit of the plot’s belly and moves upwards towards us, sometimes missing its target.
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More than the screenplay (Milap Zaveri, Sajid Khan, Vibha Singh), which moves helter-skelter in every direction away from the centre of the plot and just about succeeds in coming to a reasonably coherent conclusion, it is the bevy of characters who are positioned in the screenplay with a supreme sense of pyramidal aptness.
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Every actor shines because he or she knows the idea is to have fun and to transmit that fun to the audience. It’s the actors’ responsibility to make the maze of inter-relations hold together. They succeed.
Yes, sometimes the actors seem to enjoy the comedy of energetic error more than we do. Beyond a point, how many slap-happy, slipping-on-the-floor, nudge-nudge-wink-wink, oops-we-did-it-again, rolling-of-the-eyes, biting-of-the-tongue jokes can we take??
But somehow it all holds together. Like a jigsaw done in the pages of a comic book and then put on celluloid, Housefull evokes smiles and chuckles in cramped and wide-open spaces. Seen as a comic-book caper, Housefull succeeds in slamming the laughter in place without slipping on its banana-peel humour.
There is a casino in London where our loser-hero is beckoned to stem losses, a casino waitress (Lara Dutta) whose traditional Gujarati father (Boman Irani, as confidently spontaneous as ever) has disowned her for eloping with a man of her choice, a stern government agent (Arjun Rampal, the only actor who doesn’t get to smile in this chirpy chuckle-fest), an oversexed sexy widow (Lilette Dubey), and assorted characters who come and go in a whoosh of wacky misunderstandings, confused identity and half-resolved comic snarls.
Housefull is a full-on flamboyant farce. Strangely, there’s a subtlety, even tenderness at times, to the way the director handles the satirical material centred on the theme of a loser who brings bad luck on himself so often that he begins to wonder if there’s a method to the madness of his destiny.
Unlike most situational comedies, Housefull chooses the lower octaves of storytelling. The scale is pitched down. Even when the characters scream their lungs out, we don’t wince in discomfort. This is the most well-behaved comedy in recent times with an array of pert but low-key performances.
Stripped of all buffoonery, Akshay Kumar does his most delicately balanced comic act ever. There’s a mellow maturity to the way he balances farce with a more underplayed style of comedy. Riteish Deshmukh provides Akshay with the right cues. So do the rest of the actors. Among the three glamorous and sexy ladies, Lara Dutta has the best comic timing and Deepika Padukone the most thehrao in her outward projection of the farcical element. Mention must be made of Chunky Pandey who brings the roof down with his Italian-Punjabi accent and burlesque.
The visual quality, be it in London or Italy, is exceedingly eye-catching without the grins gathering a gallant garishness around the farce. Housefull looks and feels right. The climax in ‘Buckingham Palace’ (replete with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles look-alikes) depends too closely on a literal outflow of laughter gas. But that’s okay. Delicacy of comic presentation is not a claim that Housefull makes. But moments of muffled tenderness just happen in the plot’s confounded journey of a loser from no-love to know-love. Worth watching for its mix of the wacky and the more tender variety of laughter.
Akshay Kumar had a ball doing Housefull. “Not just the three ladies but also Riteish Deshmukh and Arjun Rampal. Riteish was great fun. Shooting was a playground with him around. He just cracks me up. We once put all the cutlery at the breakfast table in a hotel in Italy in Jiah Khan’s bag and told the waiter to check her bag. Jiah took it sportingly. Arjun Rampal too has great comic timing. Lara Dutta is such an elegant lady and yet she can be one of the boys when it comes to comedy.”
In Housefull Akshay gets to pay a homage to Mithun Chakraborty and Dharmendra. “The director Sajid Khan’s sister Farah was doing the choreography. I suggested we put in the pelvic movements of Mithunda (Chakraborty) and the extempore dance movements of Dharamji (Dharmendra). It was my life-long ambition to dance like these two legends. They dance from their heart. I’m also a big fan of Dutt Saab (Sanjay)’s dance movements. I remember how taken up I was when Rocky was released. He used to make his long hair dance.”
Akshay Kumar had three leading ladies in Housefull. “Yes I’ve three wives in Housefull. It’s all a comic mix-up. But I basically play a loser. I enjoyed playing a loser more than any macho role I usually play. See, all us men are duffers underneath the swagger anyway. We may act cool for the ladies. But that’s all an act. If you take away my wife, my designer clothes and my flashy car, I’m just a scared little boy at heart. Without the support system we’re losers. In Housefull I play an out-of-luck guy who gets caught in a crazy situation.”
When we started shooting for Housefull in London, he sent all the actors a signed letter stating this would be the biggest film of their career. That’s Sajid Khan for you. I’m very different. I’m always trying to be as humble as possible.”
Akshay has worked with both brother Sajid and sister Farah Khan. He reluctantly compared both. “I actually finished fifty percent of Sajid’s film before I went into Farah’s film. Actually they’re very different from one another. But they both believe in making big bonkers Bollywood blockbusters.”
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