Even as father and son sit at the dinner table, typing on their phones and apparently in separate worlds, they exchange feelings and ideas mediated by Tara. To help the father communicate with his unresponsive son (Kabir won’t even friend him on Facebook), they set up a fake account in the name of the good-looking “Tara,” to whom Kabir starts pouring his heart out. The neighbors include a colorful cast of supporting characters who form a tight-knit group of community support. In reality, their new home is spacious and gracious with two servants. Now he’s being forced to move from their pleasant house on a leafy street to the slumlike Old Delhi, much against his will.
He detests his self-centered father (Kapoor) who is responsible, in Kabir’s view, for not taking her to a good hospital while there was still time. So let's look at this unfinished film as representative of the incomplete people it depicts.It’s unhappy moving day for Kabir (Anirudh Tanwar), a sad-eyed young musician who is still reeling from his beloved mother’s death. But then as a famous poet once declared "Kabhi kissiko muqammal jahaan nahin milta". It is a sweet if somewhat strained attempt to make sense of Delhi's quasi-diasporic demagogue. No such harsh description can be applied to this film. He does have one strong moment with the pretty Amyra Dastur (nose ring and all to look adequately rebellious) when he confesses she isn't 'disgusting'.(She has just returned the money she owes him and I agree that's a rare quality). And Aparshakti Khurrana who never fails to make an impact scarcely gets a chance to make an impact in his loutish revolver-toting loverboy's role. Fatally the actor Anirudh Tanwar playing Rishi's son fails to make his character relatable.
Rishi Kapoor, who is never knwn to fail the script, barely manages to make the disgruntled father's role credible. The nooks and corners of Chandni Chowk are explored with curious candour, with the very talented Adil Hussain showing up in one fleeting scene. The son's attachment to his dead mother and the resultant hostility towards his father could have been better explored. Nonethless "Rajma Chawal" is not all a wash-out. It really makes no sense for the patriarch to employ an outsider's help, paying her huge amounts of money to do the needful when he's allegedly bankrupt, while the son sulks and sings some songs with a ragged band that wouldn't qualify in the first round of any music contest. Midway through the promising but compromised screenplay (Vivek Anchalia, Manurishi Chadha, Leena Yadav), the film introduces the wild-child character of Tara (Amyra Dastur),a homeless nomadic opportunistic adventurer who is befriended by Raj Mathur and his busybody friends (all played by savvy veterans) to bring Raj's son back on the track. The problem is, the more it tries the more the plot ties itself into impossible knots. "Rajma Chawal" aims to be in a more realistic natural space. Such improbabilities would go unnoticed in escapist kitsch. For one, it is hard to swallow that a father would carry on the charade of posing as a girl named Tara on Facebook to get his son's attention, Aand the son would not come to know of his father's hare-brained scheme even when the father asks his son for headphones after the son offers to play a song for 'Tara' during their net-chat. The plot hops, skips and jumps all over the place barely able to avoid the potholes it creates for itself. The scenes where the two ladies set up Rishi Kapoor's Raj Mathur on the iPhone with his son Kabir are done with a sense of reined-in fun.īut then it all comes undone. A tech-savvy aunt and her daughter-in-law (played with wonderful charm by Nirmal Rishi and Sheeba Chaddha) suggests that the father chat on Facebook with his son.ĪLSO READ: I was literally asked to leave town for various reasons, says Leena Yadav
Here, Leena Yadav who gave us the brilliant "Parched" two years ago is not as comfortable dealing with an estranged father-son's attempts to iron out their differences as a gaggle of friends and distant relatives in Old Delhi eggs them on. Chopra's "Chandni Chowk" to Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's "Delhi 6" to Kabir Khan's "Bajrangi Bhaijaan" have pitched their tale's tent in the crowded 'galis' of Chandni Chowk where the sun sets and the jalebis never stops sizzling in the streetside 'kadhaai' (wok). What is it about Old Delhi that drives filmmakers crazy with yearning and nostalgia? So many memorable and not-so-memorable films, from B.R. The closing song of this sensible but scattered film goes, "Mujhe dosti karne ka shauq hai, mera dil chandni Chowk hai".
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