Happy New Year

Not mere tolerance, I have a tremendous appetite for Farah Khan films. I enjoyed the ‘infantile’ Main Hoon Naa and find Om Shanti Om to be one of the best Bollywood masala entertainers in recent times. In Happy New Year, Farah goes relentlessly and deliberately puerile with her humour that reminds one of the gross-out There’s Something About Mary. The vomit in HNY could well be the ejaculation hair gel bit in Mary. If there was disability there, it’s fits and seizures here. Your response to HNY then depends entirely on how much of the foul and the unpleasant you can personally take.

Having said that, there are some fair bits as well. Like Bang Bang a few weeks back, looking for logic in HNY is not just difficult but impossible. However, the suspension of disbelief was easier for me here because even as the film appalled (what were Anurag Kash­yap-Vishal Dadlani doing here), it kept me engaged the way Bang Bang could not. In fact, there were moments of mirth and irreverence where I chortled away—a group of men practising ballet, filmed in the silent cinema mode, Abhishek trying to grab at something out of his reach in the most hare-brained way possible, the ‘itni zor se mat socho’ routine inside the elevator and Aa dekhein zara kismein kitna hai dum sung in Korean with English subtitles. The good-hum­oured dig at Narendra Modi and the not-so-good-hum­oured one at Saroj Khan had me giggling silly. Wish there was more of such lunacy and less of the vile. One of my favourite SRK films, Baadshah, is also the most deliciously asinine. It turns the stupid into something sublime. HNY held the promise of making fine art out of stupidity, yet went back on it.

It’s a one-line plot, like most Farah films. A group of people are gathered together by one individual to commit a heist. Thinking Ocean’s 11 here is pointless, compare it to Dhoom 3 if you really have to. The film plods at the start, with long intros to each of the characters and big doses of slapstick action complete with the cake routine. There is spoofing and self-referencing at each step—from ‘chor baap’, ‘maa ka tumour’ to ‘mera pyaar Shalimar’. There is a deliberateness with which all these formulae have been retained, a cockiness with which every character is reduced to a caricature.

Abhishek is the one who plays to the gallery with the right bit of ham, Deepika looks luminous and dances like a dream, the essential qualification for being heroine number 1. SRK is hardly SRK as we have known him. He is either trying to beat a Salman or Hrithik at their six-pack game. Or managing the rest of the cast from behind. Or plugging the brands he endorses. The film is a clear abnegation of his role as a star to become a canny businessman.