REVIEW: Shahrukh Bola Khoobsurat Hai Tu

PATCHY DRAMA

There are two sides to a low-budget, arty film set on the streets of Mumbai. At one level it's refreshing to watch people who look real, speak the everyday language of the metropolis and move about in locations that don't seem like cardboard sets. On the other hand, there's often a self-consciousness that leads to rambling and pontification and production values that aren't always up to the mark. Makarand Deshpande's directorial debut Shahrukh Bola Khoobsurat Hai Tu straddles both ends of this spectrum. 

A flower-seller (Preeti Chawla) has a chance encounter with her idol Shah Rukh Khan at a traffic light. He rolls down his car window, glances at her and flashing his trademark dimpled smile says, "Khoobsurat hai tu", before zooming off. Her jealous admirer (Sanjay Dadheech) stabs her in the stomach for loving Shah Rukh more than him. A journalist and his German girlfriend happen to be passing by and pick up the story. A cop who also likes SRK thrashes up the youth. A prostitute who loves the boy uses her charms on the cop to have him released and later, on the local don to get him an autorickshaw.

Problem is, that premise, of a slum girl's life getting magically transformed by her fleeting interaction with her God, isn't developed as effectively through the screenplay. There are absorbing moments -- like the time a goon is beating up the youth outside a cinema hall showing Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and the flower girl mouths an entire dialogue from the film to have him rescued. Or the time she evokes Shah Rukh's memory to gain strength to fight her arch rival. 

The cult of celebrity, the transformational power of those we idolise and the stark and perhaps disturbing contrast between the make-believe of the silver screen and the squalour and drudgery of slum life (or indeed everyday life for any ordinary soul) is certainly good fodder for fiction. But for most part, Shah Rukh Bola is chequered and dull, even though its insights into the aspirations, dreams, loves and lives of street people seem more authentic than those projected in Madhur Bhandarkar's Traffic Signal.