09/07/2021
Movie review .
By :- Avijit Dey ..
BHSM 2nd year ..
U.R. No. - 31284919029 ..
Movie :- Angrezi Medium ..
Director :- Homi Adajania
Writers :- Bhavesh Mandalia , Gaurav Shukla , Vinay Chhawal .
Genre :- Comedy , Drama ..
Release date :- March 13, 2020 (India)
Country of origin :- India .
Official sites :- hotstarOfficial , page.
Language :- Hindi.
Filming locations :- Udaipur, Rajasthan, India
Production companies :- Maddock Films , Skywalk Films , The Crew Rajasthan
Run time :- 2 hr 30 min .
Details :-
Hindi Medium (2017) was a path-breaking film about a couple"s desire to get their daughter admitted to a good school. They try all sorts of loopholes to get that done. Angrezi Medium takes the idea forward and applies it to higher education on foreign shores. It"s about a daughter"s dream to study in a premier college in London and a father"s determination to see the dream through.
Champak Bansal (Irrfan Khan) runs a small sweet shop by the name Ghasiteram. He"s in a legal soup along with most of his relatives because everyone runs a sweetshop with the same name. He has single-handedly brought up his child after the untimely death of his wife. The girl, Tarika (Radhika Madan) wants to study college in Britain. She even wins a chance to get there through a tie-up of her school to a prestigious British university. Plans go downhill however due to Champak"s righteous rant against corruption at the school"s felicitation ceremony. But he vows to try everything he can to send his daughter there nevertheless.
The first half, which is focussed on the father-daughter bond, breezes by smoothly. The problem starts in the second half where logic is thrown under the bus and left to die. Champak and his cousin (Deepak Dobriyal) get deported for inane reasons. And while their attempts to get back to England, both real and imagined, are hilarious, their antics derail the main theme of the film. From being a father-daughter film, it becomes a Marx Brothers kind of comedy. Basically a large portion of the second half is a string of gags involving two brilliant actors -- Irrfan Khan and Deepak Dobriyal -- feeding off each other and having you rolling in the aisle with their split-second timing. While they do serve you a masterclass in comic acting, this whole sequence somehow makes Radhika Madan’s track look redundant.
Kareena Kapoor Khan is introduced in the second half as a hard-boiled cop and Dimple Kapadia is shown to be her mom. The two women don’t get along and are bitter towards each other but we’re given no clue as to why. And their thawing of relations is too sudden, too soon. Radhika Madan’s character is shown to be a caring and sensitive youngster in the first half and becomes somewhat selfish and uncaring in the second half. Again, we aren’t told what leads to this change. She has the latest laptop and the latest phone and is quite connected to what’s happening in the world and yet we are expected to believe she hasn’t read up on immigration or admission rules and is just supposed to blindly follow her father and uncle’s loony plans. The film should have been a journey of self-discovery for Radhika’s character but as said earlier, the director decided to make it a hardcore comedy instead. All-in-all, the film touches upon lots of strands ranging from immigration, generation gap, the difference between the East and the West, family values etc but doesn’t properly explore them. Ranvir Shorey plays a shady businessman who indulges in all kinds of underhand dealings. While he’s effective indeed, nothing he does to make sure of the admission makes sense.
The whole thing could have turned into a sham in the hands of lesser actors. But his casting choices have proven lucky for director Homi Adajania. Radhika and Irrfan look like real-life father and daughter. The bond they share is palpable. You root for them and want them to succeed. You overlook the complete absence of a plausible plot just because of the emotional quotient they share. Deepak Dobriyal makes comedy look easy and should be cast together with Irrfan in more films. Dimple and Kareena are solid as ever in their respective cameos. Their relationship needed to be explored in a better way.
Irrfan Khan, as we know, was undergoing treatment for a near-fatal disease and was in much pain throughout the shooting of the film. So kudos to him for overcoming the odds and giving us another masterful performance. We only wish the script should have matched his heroic effort...
