Subhash K Jha speaks about What The Fish

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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USA: Free $30 Oye! Times readers Get FREE $30 to spend on Amazon, Walmart…Subhash K Jha speaks about What The Fish So okay. Comedies are hard to sustain for more than hour…and yes, this one does over-run its playing-time by 20 minutes although it's just about a 100 minutes in length. And that's a 100 conveying sustained satirical strength. The quality of the humour and the context of the characters' comic tangles is, on the ha-ha-ho-ho whole, adroitly maintained sustained and executed.

So here goes. A cantankerous old woman in Delhi, Sudha Mishra (Dimple Kapadia, delightfully over-the-top) leaves her home and its two specific properties namely the pet fish and the money-plant, in the care of her couldn't-care-less niece who promptly hands over the responsibility to her ever-accommodating boyfriend.

The rest of this wackily wound-up comedy records the relay-race styled exchange of the old woman's home's care from one set of noisy eccentric characters to another.

Besides its immensely warm underbelly, what captures your attention is the originality of the material. Here is a comedy that seeks no reference-points from foreign sources, does not lean towards Hollywood for its humour quotient.

No, this is not a take on Chris Columbus' Home Alone. Set in Delhi , though not compulsively taken up with taking us on a tour of the Capital, the narrative gets its energy from the robust telling of a reasonably sturdy comic situation. The wit is never derivative but constantly probing suburban eccentricities. The character of the Haryanvi lout Hooda (Mithun Rodwittiya) who plays patron-lover to a Mary Kom lookalike boxer from Manipur would be a laughing-stock were he not so desperately pathetic.

The performances add to the narrative's flavourful texture. The actors, young and old, are cleverly cast. While Dimple's cranky act is expectedly winsome (when has this actress not been a winner?), Manu Rishi as the neighbourhood lech who seduces his young friend's naive fiancée (Deepti Pujari) when she is home alone (Macaulay Culkin be damned!) puts in the other outstanding performance.

Manu is an actor who knows his character's sleazy underbelly and nails it unabashedly.

There are other interesting characters, like the young vain Haryanvi boxer Rajpal (Vishal Sharma) who likes to cross-dress in the night and performs a Kathak Mujra in the isolation of Dimple's mauled manhandled misused abode. And Manjot Singh as a pet-shop owner whose sales of a particular variety of pet fish escalates is also in-sync with the satire.

Come to think of it, the actors are all delightful, careening from the comic to the crazy without losing a beat or succumbing to the pressures of the heated humour.

I found portions of the comedy to be under-nourished and over-baked. The climactic scream ended up as a shuddering whimper. But that didn't take away from the swing and the sting of the frenetic chuckle-worthy happenings.

Quirky, capricious and cute, What The Fish is a warm little concoction with pockets of endearing eccentricity and feyness. The midriff of the narrative sags. But there are ample measures of giggle-inducing characters hiding their own ridiculousness in the garb of urbane casualness.

Think of a young girl all alone in a stranger's house being seduced by a sleaze ball old enough to be her boyfriend's bhaiyya. Think of her waking up the next morning with her values sourced from her home-town Saharanpur to declare the sleazy sly seducer as her husband to whom she has surrendered her tan-man-dhan in the night. Sleaze ball beats a hasty retreat and sends a brassy woman-friend to deal with the lately-virgin wannabe bride.

Director Gurmmeet Singh keeps the proceedings frothy and even-paced.

ou may not come away with much of a message to take home. But by jove, you will never ever leave your home in care of any relative after this.

Article written by staff at Bollywood Hungama. Read more

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