Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd has just the right mix of warmth and fun, served up with lashings of wisdom. Six just-married couples travel by bus from Mumbai to Goa, check into a cluster of cottages, and set about having a, well, honeymoon. Kagti’s characters are wildly different from each other, as they have to be in a film like this: the fifty-plus Boman and Shabana(call us Mr and Mrs 55, he says, only half-sardonically, she only smiles because it is the truth) who have come together for a second innings, the oh-so-Bong Kay Kay and Raima(he’s all oiled hair, she’s all demure in six yard saris), the madly-in-love childhood sweethearts Abhay and Minishha(that they play Parsis is incidental, the operative part is that Do Everything Together, down to wearing matching tees on the beach).
There’s also the hearty Punjabi kudi and her glum husband(Amisha and Karan), the passionate Mumbai chick and her extremely reluctant NRI spouse(Sandhya and Vikram), and the coarse Gujjubhai and his cowering bride(Ranvir and Dia). This sort of film can easily slide into loud overbearing slush, like last month’s Salaam-e-Ishq. Kagti, who has assisted Farhan Akhtar, Ashutosh Gowarikar and Rajat Kapoor, among others, keeps it understated and smooth, never letting the backstories overpower the present.
The director flubs it here and there: to have the bus driver speak with a faux Purabiya accent, as representative of the hidebound Indian, just to be building in difference, is not a great idea. He delivers himself of an outraged lecture when Dia runs away with her lover in the middle of the trip(hamre gaon mein hota toh ladki ka saamuhik balatkaar karte, aur usko aur uske yaar ko wahin gaad detey): the film halts in its tracks. It does ditto when the end turns a tad tame and preachy, when the self-same lovers ask for a lift with all the happily-married types, and the driver objects. Shabana turns saviour, and delivers a lecture of her own, about the importance of pyar- mohabbat and doing the right thing way.
The attempt is clearly to get the movie into the mainstream: can’t have it too urban and multiplex, can we? So the dialogue is mainly Hindi laced with lots of English, underscored with Bangla and Parsi phrases, to keep it natural. And it does work, except when people begin mounting pulpits. Spare us, please.
It’s when the director keeps it light and easy that the movie strikes all the right notes. The characters, most of whom show some amount of decorous skin(they are on a honeymoon, right?) are sketched with firm brushstrokes. Finding your way around the minds and bodies of people is a fraught business, even when you are legally wedded, and Kagti does it with skill. Some of the situational riffs are downright delightful(Shabana teaching Boman to say ‘Ghalib’ properly, Kay Kay running down the beach to protect Raima’s modesty as her unravelling sari unfurls in the sky as she goes sky-diving, and his superb breakout gig, when he musses up his hair, gets on to the makeshift stage, and lets it all hang out). There’s a great moment on the beach between Boman and Shabana as they discover, at the same time, the dawning of the possibility of real happiness, not just cosmetic suturing. It happens. That’s life.