Subhash K Jha Revisits Hansal Mehta’s Yeh Kya Ho Raha Hai which released in 2002.
Introducing Prashant, Aamir, Vaibhav, and Yash
Written by Suparn Verma
Directed by Hansal Mehta
We have to hand it to Hansal Mehta. He moves from genre to genre with absolute unselfconsciousness. From a black social comedy in Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar to a slick Jackie Chan-styled gangster flick Chhal, and now a coming-of-age flick with flickers of funny moments swathed in acres of aching yearnings.
What more could we ask for? Well, originality, for one. Though Suparn Verma’s script is sporadically newfangled major chunks of the boys-wanna-get-laid tale are taken from ….let’s see, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (check out the relationship that grows between the randy Ranjeet and the girl-next-door Anu and see if it doesn’t remind you of Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol in Karan Johar’s neo-classic), American Pie (the opening porno-drooling quartet and bawdy Bunty’s sexologist-father who encourages his son to sow his wild oats are slices of yankee Pie) and of course Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai….
Yes, how can we forget last year’s cult classic when writer Verma and director Mehta wouldn’t let us forget for even a second? The choreography songs and the protagonists body and bawdy language and the sensitive Johnny’s attraction towards his teacher Stella (remember Akshaye Khanna and Dimple Kapadia?) all echo Dil Chahta Hai feebly.
Somewhere in this aphrodisiacal brew that changes colours from a prickly purple to a hazy blue, we begin to seek signs of subtlety and softness. Director Hansal Mehta massages the libidio gently. Whenever the spoilsport censorboard haven’t stepped in with beeps on the soundtrack there are references to sex, sex and more sex. And when it isn’t that magical three-word to get the audience all hot and lathered then we get oodles of lascivious allusions to sexy topics like porno films and over-sized breasts.
The potential humour emerging from the four friends’ desperate bid to have sex never quite transmits itself to us viewers. Like Ranjit (Prashant), Rahul (Amir Ali Malik), Bunty (Vaibhav) and Johnny(Yash) we’re often served up the equivalent of the coitus interruptus. A detumescent comedy , and that too coming from the intelligent writer-director team which earlier gave us Chhal, isn’t amusing.
Take the way Rahul keeps running into two louts in the row behind each time he takes his girlfriend to the movies, or the way the callow (and hectically horny) Bunty is pressurized into sex by a cop’s ungainly and over-sexed wife. These scenes are built for loud laughter. Somewhere in the journey from script to screen the lewd dudes get ensnared in a series of non-happening freebies.
The narration follows the episodic movement of Hollywood’s bubblegum campus comedies. Alas , none of Mehta’s new male and female faces have it in them to hold the restless episodes in place. Though the gallery of fresh faces deserve bonus marks for trying they constantly lose their places in the book of broad humour and fall into an abyss where the laughter turns into a squeal of dismay.
Mehta’s native intelligence as a director is constantly challenged by the basic purpose of the endeavour. Did Mehta really want to make a film about boys grappling with the growth into manhood? Or did he just want to shock us with psst-psst references to , ahem ahem, sex?
Some of the songs by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy liberally scatter naked skin on screen . Efforts to put meat under the skin with “clever” names-dropping (sexologist Prakash Kothari and film critic Khalid Mohamed are mentioned in the babbling banter) really doesn’t help inject vigour into the mood of painful ennui.
There are intermittent moments that exude a welcome warmth. But most of the time the four protagonists’ frightful and single-minded genital jabber represents their cerebral vacuousness which we cannot separate from the director’s vision. We cannot fathom if we are watching the director dumbing down his characters or joining in the dumb charade.
Nonetheless this is a fun film for a lost generation which thinks with an organ other than the brain.
