Besides being a well made film Hazaaron Khwahishen Aisi suddenly attached a great deal of seriousness to ‘A Sudhir Mishra Film’ but the subsequent follow ups have been a different story. Mishra’s latest Yeh Saali Zindagi is one confused hack job that makes you wonder if half a decade ago Mishra’s seminal offering was one of those once in a lifetime things.
Between a million characters and locations that constitute Yeh Saali Zindagi, the film is about desperate people in desperate times or something like that. Arun (Irrfan) likes Priti (Chitrangda Singh) enough to fall in love with her but she falls for Shyam (Vipul Gupta), a brat whose rich industrialist father (Naseer Abdullah) is broke and wants him to get over the nightclub singer and marry politician Verma’s daughter, who doesn’t give a damn about her fiancé. Verma’s former henchman Bade (Yashpal Sharma) is locked up in Tihar jail and waits for his step-brother Chote (Prashant Narayan), based out of
Don’t worry if you find the plot confusing for it really is confusing but what makes it worse is the wannabe hackneyed stylish treatment that Mishra meats out. Mishra’s over-zealous acolytes will be sharpening their pitchforks to go all out but truth be told Yeh Saali Zindagi tries so hard to be something that can be best described as Guy-Snatch-Ritchie-meets-every-Quentin-Tarantino-film-ever-made. Blessed with a raucous background score that only makes way for loud songs with words that celebrate irony of life till kingdom come, Yeh Saali Zindagi ends up being a muddle of just about everything under the sun.
Mishra’s story starts off with some amount of promise but his hyperkinetic screenplay just doesn’t fall into place. Every character irrespective of their part in the film is introduced like the next big thing and multiple narrators try to make everyone and everything look important but to no real effect. They talk the same, they walk the same and even act the same so much so that Arun and Kuldeep, the two ends of this rather long stick, end up looking as pedestrian as everyone else in spite of the fact that Mishra’s screenplay takes great efforts to highlight the two. While Irrfan makes Arun come alive with his sheer magnetism even in the most inconsequential of moments as if his life depends on it, Arunoday Singh falls flat. He is stiff and looks like a part that doesn’t belong to puzzle but it forced to fit the jigsaw. He is supposed to be a typical purani dilli ka banda but plays Kuldeep as chic as possible and his bad dubbing skills don’t really help. With each subsequent film Chitrangda Singh looks ordinary and once you survive her here, you’d wonder why so much was said about her being the next Smita Patil….and what can you say about Aditi Rao Hydari? Thanks to the zillion lip locks she and her co-star indulged in for the sake of authenticity she looks subjugated and shockingly asks the same questions every time she comes face to face with her husband. She plays a tormented wife who’s angry at her man, keeps calling him kutaa and sports the same sullen expression throughout the course of the film irrespective of the situation. Sushant Singh’s Satbeer is fun in parts but that’s just about it.
What’s the deal with the recent crop of Hindi films that die trying to be edgy and Tarantinoesque? These are films that have the actors thinking in English but talking in Hindi, everyone’s a dude here for they don’t walk they strut, everyone looks out for the bigger better deal and in the end once everyone has their money shot it’s the hero who walks into the sunset. Yeh Saali Zindagi comes across as traveling repertoire of bad actors who seem to be stuck at the immigration counter and weren’t given enough time to prep!
Sudhir Mishra loves the idea of irony and doesn’t let go of any opportunity to display his love for it. His screenplay gives importance to every nuance and each character as they talk about that thing called irony but instead of keeping this idea in control he goes overboard in the bid to impress upon us how irony plays a greater role than imagined in the matters of love and life. Yeh Saali Zindagi had a spark of energy that could have been better handled but with an inconsistent screenplay and erratic editing that jumps from suddenly jumps from present to past to educate us about some past action that helped shape the character, the ride’s really bumpy. Beside Irrfan the other thing that makes somewhat of an impression is Sachin Krishnan’s cinematography that infuses some vigor in the film but on the whole Yeh Saali Zindagi isn’t as exciting as it wants you to believe it is.
Rating: 1 ½ out of 5
Cast: Irrfan, Arunoday Singh, Chitrangda Singh, Aditi Rao Hydari, Sushant Singh, Yashpal Sharma, Prashant Narayanan and Vipul Gupta
Written by: Sudhir Mishra, (Dialogues- Sudhir Mishra and Manu Rishi)
Directed by: Sudhir Mishra
Image: www.showbizarre.com
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