Deva (Abhishek) is a toughie who uses Mastaan as his surname. Rani, brought up by a thief, is a conwoman-cum-pickpocket with a skeletal partner who suffers from chronic diarrhoea. Shiva steps into the marriage pandal where the shrewish Mamata is getting her pretty but stupid daughter married off to the evil manager’s stupid son. He promptly gets the buffoon out of the way and marries the pretty girl who is actually Deva’s step-sister. Thus begins a battle of wits between the saas and the jamai and the manager. Everything in this nonsense film ends happily ever after with the bad ones out of the way.

Technical expertise
Piya Dasgupta who plays Rani is an audio-visual shock. Whether this character and her get-up are by design intended to trigger comedy or structured into the actress herself, one does not know. But she is truly not fit to face any camera anywhere in the world in her present persona. In what seems to be a small-town set-up, this haathi mere saathi struts about in jeans she threatens to pop out of, matched with designer tops and a bobbed wig that fails to simulate the real thing even once. To make matters worse, her idea of acting is to horrify rather than to entertain. Prosenjit tries his best to live up to a badly-written role full of comic gags and circus tricks and sometimes does it well. Abhishek and Namrata are more like glamourised junior artistes taken for effect. Anamika Saha pours all the foundation she can on her face while the men sport all kinds of wigs one can imagine. The cameraman did not bother about lighting, as everything looks quite flatly lit. The editing is so bad that it makes one suspect whether Sengupta hired an editor at all.
Verdict
The makers insist that Ghar Jamai is a box- office hit. But the near-empty stalls and balcony of Bharati theatre in South Calcutta one week after its release contradicts this statement. If it is a hit in the villages, one does not know what to make of the village audience. One star only because it looks really bad if a film review goes without a single star.