Looking back to 2002, Subhash K Jha in a new edition of This Day That Year, focuses on Ankhiyon Se Goli Maare, which was directed by Harmesh Malhotra and starred Govinda and Raveena Tandom.
In the US, there is a ‘PG’ censor rating for films that require Parental Guidance. There should be a ‘PG’ rating in Bollywood as well. It would stand for ‘Putrid Garbage’. Effortlessly and immediately , veteran filmmaker Harmesh Malhotra’s “comedy” would fall into that extra-special bracket of ‘PG’ films which are meant to amuse the morons of the world.
Or so, Malhotra thinks. Going by the film’s ghastly sense of comic slumming and the characters’ seeming pleasure in perpetrating noise-and-visual pollution Ankhiyon Se Goli Maare could well be titled ‘Splendour In The Crass’. The laugh-turf is so crudely and inexpertly laid out that it seems the director manoeuvred the mirth yatra on a landmower . The ‘gross’ is always grimmer on the other side of ribaldry. Overstepping the line of decorum the film and its frantically boorish hero plunge into an abyss of inanity with no hope of escape for the actors or for the audience.
Malhotra who had a freak comic success with Dulhe Raja in Bihar two years ago, is now encouraged to get seriously asinine. The film takes broadly uncouth potshots at the cult of gangsterism in Mumbai. This is the second comedy in a row after Hum Kissise Kam Nahin to do so. And to decide which of the two “comedies” is cruder or less amusing is worse, is a dilemma worthy of a Hamletian debate.
It’s hard to decide which is worse, Dhawan doing a Dhawan on us or a Malhotra doing a Dhawan. Every cliché associated with Mumbai’s underworld is turned on its head—and then smashed against the nearest wall where obviously Govinda and Malhotra can’t read the writing. They’re both too busy having a rolicking time to notice that the repartee is over and all the guests have gone home.
Like it or not, the film’s main character isn’t Govinda but Kader Khan. This ever-versatile actor is cast as Bhangari, a hood with a bank balance that matches the size of his mouth. Khan with a 7.00 a.m shadow painted to his sagging cheeks (to match the ‘evergrin’ mood of the narration) looks every inch the fallen sociopath who wants nothing but the best for his darling daughter Kiran (Raveena Tandon).
The “best” for this father means a groom for his daughter who’s a bigger hoodlum than himself. Enter Shakti Dada (Shakti Kapoor) a jailbird with a penchant for being vulgar even if he’s reading the railway time-table. Papa Hood wants his Daughter to marry Vulgar Hood. But daughter prefer the business tycoon Raj Oberoi (Govinda) who first mistakes Kiran for a lost child’s mother and never stops treating her like a lost case thereafter.
There’s much to be said about Govinda’s over-exposed comic aptitudes and how he’s turning parody into self-parody. This brilliant quote-jester is reduced to a blubbering mass of hysterically improvised repartees which seem to have been written with risible randomness.
Comedy is certainly about spontaneous inspiration. But when it’s put under strenuous pressures by a discernibly vacuous team of yell-raisers who confuse crudity with comedy, it’s time to pull the stopper on the farce-similes that have been flowing out of Govinda’s unstable repertoire.
Ironically he’s far more at home impersonating a cheap roadside gangster to win over his screen-father-in-law . than “being” in character as the supposedly suave Raj Oberoi . Govinda tries hard to look involved with the shoddy material even as it lapses into a laxative mode. But it’s a losing battle with characters with running bellies and acidity burping into each other’s face for laughs.
In the second-half director Malhotra introduces a second Kader Khan, probably to make hay while the scum shines. Muddier than the most stagnant pool of water the comic collapse of Malhotra’s narration is speedened by the product’s embarrassing technical value. This director ‘s style of presentation is so old-fashioned he makes dinosaurs look like dudes. The two Kader Khans are never shown together. In true village-nautanki fashion one exits when the other enters . In this way Malhotra saves money on special affects while pretending to pay homage to the ancient traditional form of storytelling.
A woman has no place in this area of antiquated antics. So what’s Raveena Tandon doing in this feverish farce? Precious little. In the earlier Govinda comedies she did it well. Here she’s distinctly out of sorts matching steps with her co-star as they prance in France. Or is it Switzerland? Who cares? Anand-Milind’s horrendous songs make us squeeze our ears and eyes shut whenever the duo gets into action to Ganesh Acharya’s hip-rotating binges.
Most of the time Raveena just jiggles and giggles uncomfortably in the background probably wondering, like us, what the hell she’s doing here. When Harmesh Malhotra’s Dulhe Raja had been released three years ago the audiences in the cowbelt had an appetite for broad farce. Now after Devdas, they’d rather not watch brainless burlesque. Ankhiyon Se Goli Maare is an insult to human intelligence. It presumes the average man in Bihar, if not in Maharashtra, would be tickled pink when Rana Jung Bahadur and Avtar Gill playing two sidey gangsters, arrive on a garish marriage set with a container of asses’ milk.
Little does Malhotra now that the ass has been milked for all it’s worth. It’s time for the perverse parodists to make that long-due changeover. Or maybe it’s too late.
