As cool as Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai, with an added sizzle that won’t fizzle even when the film’s room -temperature gets so tepid, it smells like life’s ennui.That’s the best one-line description for debutant writer-director Sujoy Ghosh’s film about love, life, condoms and, yes fellatio.
But let’s not jump the gun. The fun begins at the beginning when we meet Rishi(Rahul Bose) and Deep(Sanjay Suri) , two regular 10-5 copywriters who dream of winning a music contest. In their dream lies a joke. Ghosh shares his characters’ jokey karma with us. Deep is deeply in love with his second-time blissfully pregnant wife Shanti(Juhi) while the cynical Rishi is on the verge of a divorce with his sullen wife Nikki(Rinke Khanna), and…. …
And what else????!!! Ghosh ‘s zany look at the world ‘s wacky truth about cracks and doubts, builds its case- history on the flimsiest chuckles and smiles of suburban existence. At times the humour goes amok(for instance Rishi and Deep caught bending compromisingly by an office boy is strictly yucky-yucky) .
Most of the time, Ghosh knows where to draw the line. From the blueprint of metropolitan life he draws a deliciously aromatic takehome pizza with toppings that are more filling than the base. With the help of his editor Suresh Pai and cinematographer Mazhar Kamran, the eager-eyed and fairly-idealistic(even when his narrative is in the throes of cynicism Ghosh remains miraculously unsullied by ugliness and negativity) the director deconstructs the secret codes of formulistic filmmaking and fills the frames with a delightful nonconformism.
Jhankar Beats is an urban fable with wings. It soars beyond any of the ‘Hinglish’ flicks about devil-may-care dudes and chicks which have emerged from the Great Bollywood Dream Factory. The end-result is sincerely funny and funnily sincere. The characters sing and dance to intangible and discernible tunes without seeming like anything but people whom we ‘ve me somewhere on the road of life Ghosh’s grasp over the grammar of music and songs is astonishing.
