Film Impressions

REVIEW: Housefull (2)

A DULL AFFAIR

Mainstream Hindi cinema is like a circus act. Audiences walk in to get entertained and forget their worries for a while, and come out refreshed. There are dazzling lights, trapeze tricks, daredevilry, clowns and dwarfs performing slapstick and animals dancing to the ringmaster’s tune. A good circus has a certain level of skill involved in invoking laughter and awe. In a bad one, there’s just an assembly of low-brow acts straining to please at any cost.

Sajid Khan’s Housefull falls in the second category. It’s the work of a lazy mind that probably decided it was easier to recycle old tricks than invent new ones. He declares that this film is homage to every entertainer from Manmohan Desai to Hrishikesh Mukherjee. It’s a tall claim. Neither director (different as their approaches to entertainment were) resorted to broad gestures or crudity as expressions of jest. Desai, the father of the lost-and-found formula (athough Yash Chopra’s Waqt was perhaps the finest example of this mini-genre), devised his own original style of illogical narrative, which continues to be replicated to this day. Mukherjee’s humour was decidedly more sophisticated and subtle. Both had their following, and deservedly so.

REVIEW: Housefull

NUTS!

It’s just not funny—or maybe it is sadly amusing to find a 40-plus actor being made to act coy, saying he doesn’t know what to do on a honeymoon.  This is Sajid Khan’s idea of humour in Housefull.

Maybe audiences should be touched that a filmmaker has tried so hard to them laugh—pity that for him comedy means corny exchanges lines like: Q: “Where did you get this sher?” A: “From the sher bazaar.”