Mubarakan **
Dir: Anees Bazmee. With: Anil Kapoor, Arjun Kapoor, Ileana
D’Cruz, Athiya Shetty. 156 mins. Cert: 12A
The Hindi comedy specialist Anees Bazmee made his name with a
series of broad, knockabout romps. 2007’s Welcome
and 2015’s Welcome Back cemented a
commercially successful partnership with Anil Kapoor; between these two
projects, he was linked with a never-realised Indian remake of The Hangover. Subtlety, you’ll gather,
isn’t Bazmee’s forte. Rather than tickle his audience with a feather, he
prefers smacking us round the head with a saucepan, usually while jabbing hard
at the sound effects button. Yet he also revels in insanely complicated plots –
curiously, this frantic gagman seems as influenced by Shakespeare in this
respect as the elegant classicist Vishal Bhardwaj.
Mubarakan,
Bazmee’s latest and most expansive endeavour, hinges on identical twins
dispatched to opposing corners of the globe at a formative age. While Karan
(Arjun Kapoor, Anil’s nephew) grows up in London, gaining a Westernised
attitude and haircut, Charan (Kapoor again), raised in the Punjab, is obliged
to don the turban and shrug meekly towards arranged marriage. Those
arrangements cue a globetrotting back-and-forth in which no farcical avenue
goes unexplored. Charan almost ends up hitched to Karan’s beloved Sweety
(Ileana D’Cruz). Talcum powder gets mistaken for hard drugs. Two weddings are
booked for the same day – December 25th, as if Christmas weren’t tricky enough.
To some degree, Bazmee’s manic style makes sense here: even
with a generous running time, there’s a lot of ground to cover. (Hopping
between England and India every other minute, the production’s carbon footprint
must have been monstrous.) Yet whole stretches of Mubarakan are garbled beyond comprehension. This plot just begs to
be lost, and its thread isn’t suddenly regained when one character attempts to
explain everybody’s movements using ketchup bottles. Bazmee doesn’t think in
straight narrative lines so much as ball up ideas like rubber bands to toss around
his sets; the approach generates zippy, unpredictable rhythms before everything
disintegrates.
What’s becoming clearer, and could even resemble a redeeming
feature if you were in the right mood, is that he adores actors: one reason he
takes on these teeming plots is to accommodate appreciably different
personalities. Anil Kapoor, prone to over-emphasis elsewhere, fits Bazmee’s
design to a tee: spritely in the Welcomes,
his wayward yet good-hearted uncle here serves as a presiding spirit, if not
the organising figure Mubarakan
needed. Several amusing sequences find him lording over what he calls his “Mini
Punjab”: a small Home Counties farm, tended to by a white manservant. (It’s
Bazmee making widescreen that now semi-legendary Goodness Gracious Me reversal about going out for an English.)
Of all this weekend’s Dunkirk-countering
comedies, Mubarakan will likely
disappear from memory first, yet it’s the first Bazmee movie to maintain its
energy well into its third act, nudged onwards by amiable performances and
unusually strong songs. Discount the sappy ending, and you might even take its
momentum for a slyly satirical mirroring of the absurd, lunatic contortions
involved in getting an arranged marriage in place. Then again, it’s also a film
in which someone leans out of a window for better phone reception and promptly
plummets, with thumping sound effect, upon his posterior. You pays your money
with Bazmee, and you continue to take your choice.
Mubarakan is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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