Bunty aur Babli review

[Edit on June 6, 2005, 6:30pm PDT - approx. 130 views of this post till now, a new record for my blog... I am touched :-) ]

Finally I saw it, went to Naz yesternight and caught the 9-12 show. Yes, I am talking about the movie Bunty aur Babli, about which I had blogged previously. The plan was to watch it last week with Gaurav, but had to meet Sanjay, Anshuman and Jagadish for some ITBHU.org stuff... so postponed the plan.

The movie is a nice timepass movie... light-hearted and full of fun. I strongly recommend watching it [and then coming back to my blog to read the review :-)].

Another interesting part was the subtitles. They converted "chaat pakora" to "pizza" and things like that.. and the song lyric conversion was hilarious [adding to the overall fun score of the movie]

Okay then... on to the review.

Spoiler Alert: This review will go in a lot of details, so if you have not watched the movie, you better watch it before you read on.

Content Warning: This content is rated PG-13 by me, some topics may be unsuitable for kids. Please be careful

[skip summary]
The movie is about Bunty a.k.a Rakesh Trivedi and Babli a.k.a Vimmi Saluja [Abhishek Bachchan and Rani Mukherjee], who are from small towns and have big dreams. They bump into each other at the lucknow railway station after having fled from their respective homes in search of a more eventful life.

However, they realise that hard work and honesty is not going to pay and turn to conning people. Once they start liking their job, there is no stopping them. They also give away a lot of money they make to the poor.

They do a lot of very brainy [and amusing] heists, you have to see it to believe it.

However, there is a police officer [Amitabh Bachchan] who is on their tail.. and finally he does catch them, when they have promised to reform themselves! The last part of the story is also interesting when he finally frees them and then recruits them as anti-conning experts [a la catch me if you can].

And now, on to my comments...
The movie started at my weak point, with scenes of Banaras, [you all know why that place is so dear to me]. Seeing the ghats, ramnagar fort, the sand on the other side of Ganga etc. made me nostalgic... I am so waiting to visit Banaras again.

The first half of the movie has a nice bunch of capers by the duo, each bigger and better than the previous one. The songs were mostly well placed [except for the nach baliye one] and the scenes of Ladakh in "Chhup Chhup ke" simply blew me away. I am putting that place in my to-visit list :-).

Rani and Abhishek share a very nice screen chemistry, which is evident in the first half in their conversations. The scenes between them showing the development of the romantic relationship fills one up with mush... as is expected from something from the Yash Raj banner. *sigh*

The second half largely belongs to the senior 'B', who amuses with his load of "UP ishtyle" dialogue delivery [not to forget that junior 'B' also refers to himself as "hum" instead of "main", a truly UP/Bihar trait]. It was nice to see them both on screen together. There were some obvious dialogues ["kahaan se ho? allahabad se.. shakal se hi lagte ho"] and the "Kajraare Kajraare" song and the scene before that bring out the father-son duo's talents.

The capers were also very witty... I liked them all... esp the Taj one... hilarious!

A lot has been said about the song, about hot hot aish looks in it, but I beg to differ. I found her more attractive in "Ishq Kamina" than in this number, indeed I found her looking cheap and sleazy in this number. If this is how a bar dancer in UP is supposed to look like, then she did a good job :-).

The ending was also very nice ["agar maine ek bhi baar aam ka achaar aur banaya to main mar jaaoongi!!" :-) ]. I am sure they will have a sequal coming [like Dhoom], but more than that, I think this can be exploited more and be made into a TV serial, with Bunty and Babli fighting crime in their special way in each episode... what do you say??

The songs were nicely picturized. Did you notice Shiamak Davar in the "Nach Baliye" song? Also, I think Big B's rap song in the end was cute :-).

Acting wise I think the main characters did very well. I wonder why I still have this feeling that Amitabh could have done better. [loved the "makkha makkhi" joke :-) ]. Junior B was nice. Rani was also good. I am slowly moving towards making her my fav. actress in the current batch, having seen Hum Tum, Black, Veer Zaara and now BnB.

A nice point of the film was the presence of some good character actors in small roles [Raj Babbar, Kiran Juneja, Puneet Issar, Rameshwari, Prem Chopra, Ranjeet, Ravi Vaswani, the lady from WBHH, the guy from lagaan, Apple Singh, ...]. This made sure that even small scenes came out well. That said, the acting in some portions did leave a lot to be desired. The girl who talked to Vimmi [babli] at the Miss India content was simply horrible. But mostly it was nice.

Now, on to some controversies:
Firstly, I read somewhere that some sikhs had complained about the fact that vimmi, a sikh, is shown taking drugs! I think they were talking about the first con scene with apple singh, in which Rani is shown smoking. If these people cannot differentiate between drugs and a fancy brand cigarette, they need to do a little more homework before making allegations. Also, Rani is shown opposing junior B's cigarette habits later, which the protestors cleverly chose to ignore.

That said, I think this movie could have done with a little less alcohol and tobacco. In this time, movie stars should try not to glorify their use to the people.. because the youth "does" get influenced.

Secondly, some people have objected to the "hot" scenes between B and B just before the interval, with all the kissing and cuddling going on. My take on this is that although I agree that you may feel a little uncomfortable seeing that with parents etc, it was shown in a very artistic way. After all, they try to highlight the "love" angle of sex. This is a hundred times better than the ads of the continuous stream of sleazy movies coming out of bollywood presently. I whole heartedly welcome the sensitive show of love between husband and wife in movies.

Incidentally, just after that song, they showed a trailer of "Bachke Rehna re Baaba", the Mallika Sherawat/ Rekha version of "heartbreakers", and Mallika alone managed to show more skin in that 3 minute trailer than Rani could manage in a 5 minute song!

Finally, as an ending comment, Yash Chopra sure knows how to make his leading ladies look good :-) . Rani looked very sexy in the movie, except the disco song in which she looks like a prostitute. The dress designer has done wonders with her clothes, especially the kurtas worn in the first song - they give her the young-and-innocent-yet-sexy-in-a-nice-way look. I think they will be next "in" thing in fashion in India [and I will miss it all since I am here in the US :-( ]

Goes on to show that you do not need to take off your clothes to look sexy [a la Mallika and others currently].

Thanks for reading uptil now. I hope you enjoyed reading this review.
Please post a comment and let me know your views about the movie or my reading of it. I am sure a lot of you have different points of view than mine.

enjoy!
-A