A Surprisingly Agile Comedy Of Arrears

If cinema is a place to have a good time, then writer-director Karan Sharma’s Bhool Chuk Maaf is just the place where you ought to be seen this weekend. It is fun and funny. Feisty and ritzy.

And yes, you would never want to see the colour yellow again. Though Bhool Chuk Maaf is about the time loop it never gets monotonous. Sharma makes the same situation look different each time.

Of course, Rajkummar Rao’s comic timing helps vitally. Rao is a riot as a wastrel with a whiny girlfriend who is trapped in a time warp.

This is an idea never tried before, and the writer-director has huge fun with the material. Karan Sharma ensures that the theme of a time-warp remains far removed from the realms of science fiction.

The spiffy screenplay is fastened to mythological concepts of guilt and moksha. Luckily, the film doesn’t get embroiled in the discursive dynamics. Mischief is the ruling sentiment, not exposition.

There is a distinct tongue-in-cheek quality to Ranjan (Rajkummar Rao)’s ‘twist’ with destiny as he wakes up every morning on the 29th in a loop, the day before his wedding.

This play-repeat-play mode is miraculously freed from a monotony. Each time Rajkummar’s cocky character Ranjan, a man with little intellect and plenty of attitude, awakens to the same dawn, the writer-director finds areas of novelty in the routine regimen. Rajkummar Rao walks into hidden places in the plot and extracts a sense of goofy fun from the remotest regions.

Bhool Chuk Maaf saves its best surprise for the last, when the comedy assumes a sombre note without tripping over its own righteousness. A character named Hamid Ansari (Aakash Makhija, interesting) makes a belated but opportune entry. Ansari is a potential suicide victim who emerges a true hero, the kind of person who thinks of the larger welfare rather than his own interests.

Rajkummar Rao has made a career of playing flawed intellectually challenged characters. This time, he is completely absorbed in playing the loser who redeems himself at the end.

And what a startling redemption!

I wish the script had not gone into a preachy over-explanatory overture at the end, with Sanjay Mishra telling us what we already know: we need to go beyond self-interest. Right.

That said, Bhool Chuk Maaf is a colourful bazaar of engaging crass-free episodes, all tightly edited (Manish Pradhan) to ensure no one out there gets bored.

Sudeep Chatterjee’s camera captures the colour and caprice of Varanasi without tripping over the crowded milieu or hyperventilating over what spirituality the riverbanks have ‘ghat’. The performers are all in top form, except for Wamiqa Gabbi who plays Rajkummar Rao’s love interest on a constantly screechy note. She loves Rao’s character, but doesn’t like him. We feel something the opposite of the film.