If you are a fan of Ekta Kapoor's terrific tidal wave of treacly television
soaps, then you are advised to keep away from her effort to win audiences
over with a cyclone of smut and sleaze in this ribald and rudely uncouth
comedy.But if you like repeated and rigorous jokes about anal sex -
replete with frantic pelvic thrusts, groans and grunts and other noises
of simulated sex - and if you think American Pie can be rendered as
a desi pao bhaji, then stop right here.
"Kya Kool Hain Hum" (KKHH) is probably your last chance to get into
the vulgar groove with such velocity. It's unlikely that our cinema
will ever get as motor-mouthed and cheesy-minded as this ever again.
You thought Indra Kumar's "Masti" was vulgar? Wait till you see Riteish
and Tusshar's anal adrenal antics in KKHH. "Masti" looks like a fairy
tale in comparison. Filled with distasteful jokes about homosexuality
and rape, everyone gets to be a brunt of the dizzying over-long and
finally fatally prolonged script's butt of ridicule.
Director Sangeeth Sivan wants audiences' laughter at any cost. The
scenes seem written predominantly for an audience just discovering the
joys of sex and the pleasures of self-gratification. Even by those amateurish
standards, the clumsy and crude vulgarity quotient takes you by surprise.
Tusshar kicks off his sober image to indulge in a binge of sexual situations,
which include a sequence where a cop thinks the hero is having sex with
a cat.
In another sequences, Tusshar "douses" his crotch with a bottle of
water after a cigarette butt accidentally gets into his pants. Everyone
thinks he has wet himself in excitement after watching a chick flip
over.
Have a hard...I mean heart!
Soon the
script and the characters lose their turgid titters. Knowing that the
prolonged three-hour joke is long over, the director resorts to flaccid
farce that won't be funny even to those in the audience who enjoy watching
Tusshar making out with a cat.
You gape in disbelief as former censor chief Anupam Kher, playing a
whacked-out shrink, does his own share of sex jokes with an overweight
Shoma Anand joining him in bed. Age and dignity seem to be no bar to
the dialogue writers Sachin Yardi and Pankaj Trivedi's stabs at verbal
vulgarity.
Every character speaks in crude double meanings. The ladies go at it
with hammered tongues, leaving you wondering what happened to the demure
damsels in distress! Admittedly Isha Koppiker playing a cop named -
hold your breath! - Urmila Matondkar gets into the mood of 'masti' with
great gusto. She does the vulgar lines and situations with a relish
that makes you grieve for the grace and dignity that leading ladies
once brought to the most riotous comedies about male bonding.
Remember Saira Banu in the relentlessly humorous "Padosan"?
The watchable actor is Reteish Deshmukh, who gets seriously sleazy
without forcing audiences to look away from the screen. Deshmukh seems
to be having fun. Poor guy. All through this homage to an uncontrollably
over-sexed generation, the characters indulge in the cheapest double-speak.
Koppiker trying to anxiously seduce Tusshar to prove he's a serial killer
breaks down before her seniors. "I've begun to doubt my womanhood. A
man known to rape women of every age hasn't even looked my way."
You doubt the above dialogue that invokes laughter in the theatre.
Didn't a 17-year-old child allegedly get raped by a policeman in Mumbai
just the other day? And shouldn't the producer who has a great responsibility
as a TV software manufacturer show more sensitivity towards issues that
concern women's right to dignity?
Success at what cost? And if KKHH with its italicised stress on the
shape size and various functions of unmentionable parts of the anatomy
becomes even a minor success, it's time for Indian cinema to get seriously
worried.
At many junctures, the dialogue writers pay homages to the films, characters
and actors from Ram Gopal Varma's cinema, including Urmila Matondkar.
But if I was Urmila I'd sue the makers of this film for defamation.
You can't condone a film for trying to be funny in vain when it shows
a serial killer arriving at the police station to confess his crimes
with a tiffin-carrier filled with parts of women's anatomy.
Two women of great repute Shobha Kapoor and Ekta Kapoor are credited
as this abominably obscene film's producers.
God save the screen.