REPETITIVE
All that Banarasi Babu has going for it is Govinda’s undeniable talent as an entertainer who will dance and prance, do delicious take-offs on dialects and accents, and make a virtue of being clutzy. But even Govinda’s repetitive act palls after a while because David Dhawan offers absolutely nothing against which the star can pit his talent. No actor — not even a star entertainer who carries a one-man portmanteau of populist acts familiar from many past hits — can perform in a vacuum. This is a vacuum which is even more vacuous than is the norm for a David Dhawan film. First of all, the story which thinks plausibility is an expendable commodity in a mainstream entertainer. Even the implausible world of Hindi commercial cinema has to have an internal logic if it has to succeed. But logic is the last thing you find in Banarasi Babu. It has a one line story: how to teach a westernised girl born and bred in Singapore the “values” of Indian society, which in effect means humiliate her to accept that the dehati husband knows what is best. And that is, to behave like a good, ghunghat-wearing bahu and not a brazen hussy who will dive into the village pond flaunting her swim suit. Not that the heroine Madhu(Ramya Krishnan) is flattered by a swim suit or the brief dresses she is made to wear in the name of Westernisation. Like all labels, Westernisation here means a matter of clothes, no matter if the desi costumes worn for some of the dance numbers are equally indecent! Worse, the heroine Madhu is a puppet who doesn’t seem to have even a thought — let alone an independent mind when it comes to the most important decisions in life like marriage. Her virago of a mother, Lily — played by Bindu, the old trouper of vampy glamour — first decides that Madhu should marry a suited-booted smoothie who receives them in Banaras. He happens to be the brother of a calculating Singapore friend and is prepared to be a ghar jamai. Kadar Khan is the familiar hen-pecked husband whose sotto voice asides are supposed to be funny and full of salutary wisdom. He wants his only child to marry Gopi (Govinda), son of a childhood friend who is not only the Sarpanch of the village but has a resplendent wardrobe of designer co-ordinated dhoti-kurta-jackets in all rainbow hues. We are expected to swallow that Madhu is such a witless ninny that she is ready to marry the city slicker one moment and equally willing to marry Gopi a few minutes after he abducts her from the mandap. You wonder if she is worth all the trouble of going all the way to Singapore to fetch her back to the village. We then have to endure a whole lot of nonsense which is far from funny... Like Gopi managing to get her pregnant (that too after Lily has served Gopi with divorce papers!) and then pleading with the English doctor (in supposedly hilarious Hinglish!) not to perform an abortion the wicked mother and daughter want. Gopi then abducts his new-born son and returns to Banaras and, predictably enough, a repentant, demurely sari-clad Madhu follows to fall at his feet! Films of this ilk which have a dishonourably long history in our cinema have yet another obligatory task. And that is, to incite the trodden worm of a husband to rouse himself from grudging apathy and deal the errant wife a stinging slap. Which routine Kadar Khan and Bindu go through, faithful to the last comma and gesture of a worn-out script. Even the purely “entertainment elements” of the film, as distinct from its overtly regressive message in the name of “Indian values,” are below par. Govinda adopts a distinctively Dilip Kumar style of dialogue delivery — reminiscent of Ganga Jumna, Naya Daur and Gopi (realise the significance of the hero’s name? — but beyond familiar buffoonery, there is not a hint of depth to the character. Even his dances — which are a hot item — look similar, because they are basically the same steps set to different words (all are jejune and some like the sasuri garam garam are particularly tasteless, and tunes. In the second half, the songs are not spaced apart and follow each other thick and fast with no respite. David Dhawan unwittingly proves what may be inimical to his own tested formula — that you can have too much of even Govinda. There is definitely too much of Shakti Kapoor whose randy village idiot transgresses the merely offensive to the unbearably boring. Ramya Krishnan, is not a foil to Govinda nor can she rise above a badly scripted non-role. Rumi Jaffrey’s dialogue is no better than his screenplay. The punch-lines are too few and far apart. There is such a tired look to the whole film giving one the impression that the unit doesn’t really believe in what it is doing. If the perpetrators of mindless masala stop believing in their own work, how do you expect the audience to react-like well trained monkeys laughing on cue? |
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The law of diminishing returns applies to everyone. Even to
the Govinda-David Dhawan combination which seems to think it is immune to
failure. But when the story is asinine, the theme offensively regressive
and the story-telling even more haphazard than usual, such selfconfidence
is riding for a fall. And what a fall it is! This is what happens when a
sucessful director is so sure of his formula that he begins to have contempt
for the intelligence of the audience.
