Film: Ekkees Tareek Shubh Muhurat
Cast: Sanjay Mishra, Mukesh Tiwari, Brijendra Kala, Bhagwan Tiwari, Kajal Jain, Mahesh Sharma, Kamalika Bannerjee, Harshit, Ria Chanda, Chandrachoor Rai, Anjanikumar Khanna
Director: Pavan Kumar Chauhan
Rating: * * ½
Pavan Kumar Chauhan’s directorial debut is an interesting social satire with its heart in the right place, but the scripting feels inadequate and the treatment has very little bite. A merry-go-round that starts off as an attempt to get a together couple Radha (Kajal Jain) and Gopal (Mahesh Sharma) cut across financial crisis and astrological conning to complete their oft rescheduled ‘saat pheras’, the film then becomes a messy, unseemly scramble to gain laughs at the expense of human vulnerability and corruptibility.
The prime mover here is, of course, the bride’s father Pandit Girdharilal Sharma (Sanjay Mishra), a Pandit by profession living within the temple premises and eking out a living from Katha Pravachan’s that largely go unheard. When his ailing father (Sitaram Panchal) decides on a final date for the wedding, Giridharilal gets antsy and bothered about having to cough up enough money to suit the bridegroom’s parents’ expectations of a grand wedding. Egged on by erstwhile friend and well-wisher Bulaki (Brijendra Kala) he persuades his unwilling, unemployed son Banwari (Chandrachoor Rai), who is awaiting his IAS exam results, to enter the marriage market himself and take on the burden of getting his sister married. After finalising a Bengali widow Pankhuri (Ria Chanda) who comes with a sizeable dowry, as the bride, Giridhari, on hearing of his son’s success at the IAS does a sudden, about turn.
If this film was meant to be a social commentary or expose about gender disparity, social one-upmanship, human corruptibility, criminal behaviour or material greed then it’s an abject failure, because though the themes are all represented in the narrative, none of them are developed well enough to evoke empathy or arouse sentiment enough to take ire. The performances are all solid, but the wayward writing lets the experience down. Sanjay Mishra’s role appears to be a slight variation from his regular ‘idealist’ caught within the crosshairs of an increasingly materialistic world, edict. The lead characters are well established, but the attempt to bracket in freeloaders as viable contenders for the well-lettered groom fails to incite excitement. The humour does not come through at all. After watching the movie one is clueless as to Chauhan’s objective. This film fails to sustain heightened interest.
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