Subhash K Jha looks back at late director Raj Kaushal’s Shaadi Ka Laddoo which starred Sanjay Suri, Ashish Chowdhary, Mandira Bedi, and Divya Dutta. Sanjay Suri shares his thoughts on working with the director who understood how to get the best performance out of him, a man he still misses today.
Raj Kaushal’s Shaadi Ka Laddoo is 21.
A hotshot ad maker, Ravi Kapoor, in London. His buddy Som from Ludhiana. Ravi unmarried and sick of his single status. Som married and raring to go go go. Amusing premise for a romantic comedy, specially when handled by a director who knows the world that he enters. Raj Kaushal takes us into the seemingly sexy but supremely sad world of Ravi Kapoor (Ashish Chowdhary), who looks enviously at his pal’s seemingly perfect marriage with the nice warm Punjabi kudi (Divya Dutta), while Som in London looks at every skirt and sari in sight….
The film’s fey mood is wonderfully created through animation. London has never looked more languorous and accommodating, thanks to Amit Roy’s cinematography, which goes for the kill rather than the skill. Like in I Proud To Be An Indian, the city is a living character in the plot. The music and songs by Vishal-Shekhar include silent homages to evergreen Hindi numbers like ‘Kabhi kabhi mere dil mein’. It makes you nostalgic for all the wrong reasons. ‘Kabhi Kabhie” was also a romantic musical chair. But gosh, how far apart from Shaadi Ka Laddoo and its urbane ilk!
Much of what transpires among the quartet of friends in the city fails to involve the audience. Kaushal gets the mood right. But the hookline seems to be missing most of the way. While Shashank Dabral’s screenplay, blessedly original all the way, gives the characters room to breathe freely, the plot doesn’t navigate its people in any comfortable, inviting way.
Where we ought to have been gripped by Ravi’s search for the right spouse and Som’s seven(or is it eight?) year itch, we barely bring ourselves to smile in a sequence such as the one where Som, pretending with Ravi to be putting up at a posh hotel in London, sneaks into an ordinary inn, gets his stuff, and joins Ravi outside the Holiday Inn.
Holiday mood? You bet! This is a feel-good film, all right. In the interaction among the characters, Kaushal brings a mood of jaunty wisdom. These are people who are clueless about what they want.
They just don’t get it! Wisely, the director keeps the mood light and simple. Devices from TV sitcoms and cartoon strips, not to mention a couple of extremely amiable Broadway-style musical set pieces (Kuch to ho raha hai is a gem), keep our interests alive…but barely.
The sparse, minimalist narration is overloaded with dialogues and not of a very funny variety. Take the potentially hilarious sequence where Ravi, one by one, calls up his past dates to propose marriage, and they all turn him down on one pretext or another. The girls whom Ravi proposes to seem to be masquerading as misogynistic stereotypes, while the playboy seems almost saintly.
A great set of dialogues could’ve lifted the film beyond a blizzard of babble. Unfortunately, Shashank Dabral’s dialogues don’t help the blather. When Nigar Khan playing the worst wanton woman ever seen, barges on her current boyfriend in bed, the man mutters, “I can explain. This is my sister.”
If you incest! The film doesn’t really push the romantic cartwheel hard enough. Sure, you enjoy the ‘Prince’ Ravi Kapoor’s tentative courtship of the ‘Showgirl’ Menka (debutant Samita Bangargi, playing the waitress cutely) as ‘experienced’ Som eggs on the wide-eyed Casanova. But the sequence where Som instructs Ravi on a mobile phone is straight out of a 1960s sitcom, with no giggles attached.
Sure, you enjoy Ravi’s platonic friendship with the stable, sane, and funny Tara (Mandira Bedi). And that moment at the end when, stunned by his rejection in love, he rests his head on Tara’s lap, is a beaut. But isn’t Tara too smart to get involved with someone as cheesy as Som? Why does she? Because he offers her mom’s homemade recipe for a cold?
Come on! Romantic love is, in this way, trivialized to the point of pretty prattle posing as a profound statement on the urban diaspora. The last half hour is specially blotchy, with the climactic shaadi scene (where the laddoos finally making their cloying appearance) looking disastrously washed-out. What’s more , the sound quality is exasperatingly uneven. Most of the time, we can’t make out a word of what Ashish Chowdhary is saying.
A sign of his self-defeating diffidence?
Sanjay Suri, as the roving-eyed wanna-fornicate from Ludhiana, is the life and blood of the film. With Divya Dutta going all-out as his loudly affectionate shudder-other (shades of Tabu in Biwi No.1), Suri creates a character that’s wolfish and gloriously greasy. What’s keeping this amiable actor from getting there?
The rest of the cast is, at the most, competent. The same cannot be said about the narration, which goes from mildly amusing to downright exasperating. One can see glimpses of Raj Kaushal’s subtle skills, but not enough to keep us watching with bated breath . As the crisscross of urban relationships heaves to a resolution, no one really cares.
Sanjay Suri misses Raj Kaushal. “I miss his energy and the joy he had for life. Sadly, he left too soon at just 50. He had so much to offer as a director. My bond with him goes back to 1998 when we shot for Pyar Mein Kabhi Kabhi – a film that had a maximum number of newcomers, including the famous & talented Vishal-Shekhar and Salim-Suleman. Raj had a great sense of music and was a fab narrator. He kind of understood me as an actor very well and we had a lovely understanding between us. While directing me, all he had to do was subtly tell me to take a note higher or lower in case a tone had to be changed. He just knew how to access that in an actor. I admired that about him. I found Raj to be very large hearted and was always a great host. His energy was almost magnetic. Before making Shaadi ka Ladoo, he told me, ‘I like working with actors who are like family. Don’t worry, I will make business sense out of it, and let’s all go to the UK and come back with a film in less than 25 days.’ A small crew of approximately 20-22 people, it was friends working together. Yes, the film offered me something different to do. I enjoyed the comic side of things, and he tapped into the funny side of me, which rarely any other director has. The scenes shot between Ashish and I, I still remember felt so organic and fluid beyond what was written in the script. Loved that and miss that! Once again, like Pyar Mein Kabhi Kabhi, it had lovely music. Men like Raj and the joie de vivre he had for life don’t come along often; he shall be missed till I am alive.”
