Jhankaar Beats
The guys just want to have fun. The ad agency is where their bodies go; their souls are sold out to music, and their hearts to the women in their lives.
With ‘boss’ Pancham-da as their guru (his house is a temple, where they go to ask for blessings before their jig in the competition!), they spend evenings jamming n playing in sundry clubs. The rest of the time they are just common folks – like you and me – struggling with weight, relationships, mother-in-laws, bosses, neighbours, recalcitrant cars, and wayward pigeons.
Whilst one can’t have enough of his wife (they are expecting their second kid), another can’t have less of his, and the third doesn’t know how to make his dream beau his.
Whilst the driving force of the movie is the music competition, which the guys can’t ever seem to win, at the very core of the story is the warmth of Sanjay Suri and Juhi Chawla’s happy marital life.
Their chemistry, their happiness, their bossing and their giving in, their fights and reconciliations permeate the movie with a true glow, very like the real incandescence on Juhi’s face as she shoots while actually pregnant.
There are many true moments as two good people realize how points of contact are always, at some point, also points of abrasion. Juhi’s eyes are a movie theatre of emotions as her husband is in turn lovable, loving, childish, caring, hurtful, callous and repentant.
Ordinary people, ordinary lives. And when finally triumph comes, in many more ways than one, the movie has already transcended the ordinary.
The bravura editing, the razor sharp script, the warm photography and a direction which gets triumphant performances from everybody (well, almost) finally is a ‘feel-good’ movie : in spite of its continuing condom joke, it is a film wide-eyed with innocence in its observation of the possibilities of relationships and friendship.
And in a month, when reams of paper have been spent in showcasing models turned to actresses in bikinis and actors whose broken shins are national news, we need to be perennially thankful for such heart-warming mercies ….