Director: Kushan Nandy
Writer: Ghalib Asad Bhopali
Cast: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Neha Sharma, Sanjay Mishra, Mahaakshay Chakraborty, Zarina Wahab
If I had an Rs. 2,000 note for every time a small-town Hindi comedy begins with a pretty young woman who drinks, sings, smokes secretly on the terrace, speaks about sex freely, vomits, gatecrashes weddings, deceives her family, runs away from home for the heck of it and generally behaves like a hybrid of Geet from Jab We Met (2007), Bitti from Bareilly Ki Barfi (2017) and Tanu from Tanu Weds Manu (2011), I’d be the Reserve Bank of India’s biggest nightmare. In Jogira Sara Ra Ra, that girl-template is Dimple Chaubey (Neha Sharma), a character who pretends to be kidnapped, violated, silly and pregnant in no particular order. Dimple spends the first half trying to repel a nerdy arranged match named Lallu (Mahaakshay Chakraborty) and his orthodox family. She spends the second half of the film trying to break – or maybe unbreak, who knows – her impending wedding to Jogi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), the hustler being forced to marry Dimple because he was her partner-in-fake-crime for the Lallu heist. Throw in noisy families on all sides, a trash-talking grandma, corrupt cops and an ex-gangster named Chacha Chaudhary – you know a film is in trouble when Sanjay Mishra starts winging it – and you get the glorified gag reel that is Jogira Sara Ra Ra.
The concept is mildly interesting: What if the Deepak Dobriyal character from such stories ends up with the flaky runaway bride? Or, in my eyes, what if the parrot from Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon (2003) grows feathers and feelings for the Kareena Kapoor character? But this movie is not about Dimple. What gave you that absurd idea? She is allegedly one half of a romantic comedy, but she’s more of the manic-pixie bot in the glitchy software of a male wedding planner who – surprise surprise – has sworn off marriage. Jogi, too, is his own trope generator. He is the breadwinner in a house full of sisters, aunts and a single mother. Yelling at them – and showering them with the kind of mean taunts that Govinda got away with in Kyo Kii…Main Jhuth Nahin Bolta (2001) – is his way of loving them. Jogi first sees a drunken Dimple gatecrashing a wedding he has designed, only to soon find himself working on her upcoming wedding to Lallu. The deal they strike is rooted in a shared distaste for…taste. I’m quite sure she promises to sleep with him in return for his ‘jugaad’ to scare away Lallu, a scooter-driving and sneaker-wearing and tiffin-carrying gentle giant who seems to be aping Surinder Sahni from Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008).
One of Jogi’s grand plans involves pushing Lallu off a terrace while he’s singing ‘Disco Dancer’ on the phone – because how else will Jogi deliver the punchline “he’s dancing like it’s his baap ka gaana (father’s song)” to mark the sight of Mithun Chakraborty’s son paying homage. It’s such a clumsily executed scene that you feel sorry for the actors trying desperately hard to make it look funny. His kidnapping plan is supposed to sully Dimple’s character so that Lallu’s family rejects her on patriarchal grounds. But it’s really just an excuse to have Dimple live with Jogi’s gender-forward family, galavant with his sisters as if nobody is looking for her, wear a burqa in public, ask for beedis to aid her ‘morning business,’ and school Jogi about his own sexism. It helps – or maybe it doesn’t, who knows – that Dimple sounds like a Bandra version of a Bareilly stereotype.