"Shirin Farhad Ki Toh Nikal Padi";
Star cast: Boman Irani, Farah Khan; Directed by: Bela Bhansali Sehgal;
In the latest Shirin Farhad Ki Toh Nikal Padi, Boman Irani and Farah Khan absolutely make a sweet filmi jodi.
Directed by veteran editor Bela Bhansali Sehgal, the movie is your usual filmy love story, which is predictable from the very beginning. But what sets it apart from the rest of the stories is the film's lead pair and some light-hearted moments which have been beautifully captured.
The story is of a 45 year old Parsi 'boy', Farhad (Boman Irani), who is single and very keen to mingle. Farhad lives with his 'very loving' mother (Daisy Irani) and grandmother (actress Shammi, after ages!). Society and family pressure make Farhad visit several prospective brides' homes only to be rejected from every family because of his profession. The honest and shy Farhad works as a salesman at a lingerie shop in Mumbai. One fine day, Shirin (Farah Khan) enters his shop and his life changes for ever. Farhad falls in love with the confident, bindaas, quirky 40-year-old Shirin, and it is true love for the two. But Farhad, who is a mumma's boy, has to first convince his mother, who considers Shirin as her arch rival.
While seeing Bela Sehgal's sweet tender tale of Shrin and Farhad - past the age of wedding, determined to find love and companionship in each other's boring company, one immediately thought of Basu Chatterjee's "Khatta Meetha" and Vijaya Mehta's "Pestonjee". It was a movie about a widow and a widower from the Parsi community overcoming their children's opposition for an autumnal wedding.
Mehta's "Pestonjee" was extraordinarily accurate in portraying the benign quirks of the Parsi community. So is Sehgal. Though not a Parsi herself, she plunges into the centre of the dwindling community's eccentricities without trying to give the characters any kind of a novel existence beyond what they are stereotypically known for.
The love story of Shirin (Farah Khan) and Farhad (Boman Irani) holds no surprises. They meet, they smirk, they walk hand-in-hand, and he mistakes her invitation for coffee in her home for suggestion for sex. While she makes him coffee, he waits for her undressed. And you know the rest.
The portrayal of Farhad's mother (Daisy Irani) and grandmother (Shammi) reveals the film's writer Sanjay Leela Bhansali's penchant for loud extroverted singing, dancing, chortling ageing woman characters, e.g Helen in Bhansali's "Khamoshi: The Musical" and Kirron Kher in "Devdas".
The movie makes terrific use of silent moments that are becoming progressively rare in our cinema. Farah Khan is especially reserved, a mysterious smile hovering in her eyes constantly as though she knows that life, and life in the movies, is a secret joke. In her scenes with her comatose screen-dad, Farah's eyes melt with affection. She handles the emotional moments better than the comic.
Boman seems to be reined-in. It's like a new singer, say Shailendra Singh when he had to sing duets with Lata Mangeshkar in Raj Kapoor's "Bobby". She had to hold back. Boman does that quite well to let his debutante co-star get comfortable with the camera.
Sehgal has cast true-blue Parsi actors in all the roles, big and small. In fact, I could hardly spot any non-Parsi in the cast!
The comic vein tends to get unwieldy at times, as if the attempt to be funny has taken a toll on the characters' sense of self-identity. We get a Parsi wacko (Kurush Deboo) who runs amok with a traditional gun threatening to kill anybody who comes in his way. He doesn't make much sense in the scheme of the plot. But then, what makes sense in life other than the senselessness that we see all around us?
Sehgal doesn't try to make sense of the chaos. She flows with the chaos seeking laughter in the eccentricity. Hence when an old Parsi gentleman constantly writes love notes to Indira Gandhi, you know he has lost it. And you smile, because eccentricity is a pre-condition in a rom-com about two over-the-hill Parsis, one of whom sells lingerie and meets the woman of his dreams when she comes to buy a brassiere.
Luckily, the film goes beyond innerwear and seeks a place in one's heart. The director emerges with some truly cheering moments between Boman and Farah.
The debutante director has carved an appealing relationship between the unlikely pair. The romance is embroidered with charming little incidents that add beautifully to the pacy perky spoof of Parsi proceedings. And if Boman is boldly in character as a 45-year old who surprises himself by finding love, Farah is no less confident.
More notably, it is an inspiring to see a simple, nice romantic-comedy without any slapstick which is so common in today's time. The film makes you smile and laugh with each of its characters and their crazy, confusing ways.
On the whole, it is worthy to watch once.
