Writer-director Anusha Rizvi’s charming chamber piece secretes a deeply embedded echoes of muliebrity. There are gorgeous women of every age and temperament scattered across a moderate-sized apartment in Delhi who seem to be in a truculent yet cavalier state of mind over issues ranging from a forged bank deposit to an interfaith marriage.
Unlike Govind Nihalani’s chamber piece Party, where the echoes got lost in polemical prattle, Anusha Rizvi’s portrait of a household in temporal turmoil never becomes overburdened with verbosity. Even the exchange on interfaith marriage, after an anxious couple, Zohaib (Nishank Verma) and Pallavi (Anushka Banerjee), barge into the overcrowded apartment for a place to hide from the moral police, is dealt with humour rather than anxiety.
Farida Jalal, as the matriarch, Akko is the kind of actress who can make a mountain seem like a molehill without insulting the molehill. Her playful demeanour and gossipy attitude go a long way in giving Rizvi’s chamber piece what it is looking for: levity during stressful times.
At the centre of the domestic chaos is Bani Ahmed(Kritika Kamra), a profession suddenly saddled with more than a computer on her lap. She is the centre of a universe that isn’t looking for a centre.
Admittedly, the characters keep barging in with their baggage of problems, whining and complaining, threatening the very core of the narration with more bedlam than the screenplay can handle. For example, Purab Kohli’s Amitav (excellent as a pontificating, pretentious professor who is more intrusive than edifying) and his toygirl Latika(Joyeeta Dutta) are just hanging around. Unwanted visitors are welcome in this case, I guess.
And yet here is the thing: the narration never gets rowdy. Anusha Rizvi controls the chaos like the conductor of an orchestra who knows some of the musicians are not playing in tune. She orchestrates the domestic anarchy with the expertise of a driver negotiating a tricky traffic jam.
The director has an amazing cast at her beck and call. Not only Farida Jalal, who is to this family what Rajesh Khanna was in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anand. Dolly Ahluwalia, as her cousin, is also delightfully catty and innocuous. Sheeba Chaddha, though habitually effective, is now becoming the male Manoj Pahwa: reliable but nothing further. Juhi Babbar as the oldest sister, and Shreya Dhanwanthary, as the youngest, are excellent. Why don’t we see more of them and less of the digital dominants?
The real heroes of The Great Shamsuddin Family are the technicians who have stitched together the impossibly unwieldy family’s prattle and skirmishes in an elegant pastiche: cinematographer Remy Dabashis Dalai, editor Konark Saxena, and the sound designer Kartik Pangare.
Rating: 3.5
