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Gulabo Sitabo Movie Review: It rides high on Amitabh Bachchan and Ayushmann Khurrana’s intense performances
Gulabo Sitabo Review: Gulabo Sitabo drags in parts and is only salvaged by the merit of the director to keep it under two hours.
Movie Name: Gulabo Sitabo
Gulabo Sitabo Director: Shoojit Sircar
Gulabo Sitabo Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Ayushmann Khurrana, Vijay Raaz
Gulabo Sitabo Stars: 2.5/5
One of the biggest complaints a film reviewer has today is that films which were supposed to experience on the silver screen had to compromise with a digital release. Notwithstanding that it offers a broader audience reach for the filmmakers, but storytelling is best experienced in a theatre.
Gulabo Sitabo is one such film which released on an OTT platform today. The film revolves around Mirza Sheikh (Amitabh Bachchan) and Baankey Sodhi (Ayushmann Khurrana) who stay at an almost century-old Haveli in Lucknow known as Fatima Mahal. Baankey is among several other tenants who pay meagre rent and do not want to vacate the homes despite faulting on the payments often.
Mirza, on the other hand, is not the legal owner of the property! His spouse, who is referred through the movie as Begum (Farrukh Jaffar), inherited the property from her forefathers. Mirza, who is 17 years younger to her, is waiting for her demise and the consequent legal transfer of property rights to him.
Mirza wants to throw all the tenants out. Albeit he doesn’t have any understanding of what the current market rent is or what is the cost of an antique chandelier. He hasn’t paid enough time to figure out what he will do with the property once the tenants are out. On the other hand, Baankey is living with a sense of know-it-all. He, however, isn’t even street-smart like his sibling and continues to toil hard in the flour mill and still failing to provide better living conditions for his family.
It’s the first time when the audience will see Amitabh Bachchan and Ayushmann Khurrana share screen space. Amitabh Bachchan’s prosthetics grabbed headlines when the trailer was out. Perhaps, the second time in his career after the film Paa. With a long beard, old school spectacles, a headscarf and a prosthetic-pronounced nose, Big B looks absolutely unrecognizable, and his signature baritone too has been replaced with a Lucknowi twang to it.
However, when you start watching the film, his make-up and look doesn’t distract the viewer, and he keeps the audience engaged with his performance. Ayushmann Khurrana as always gets into the skin of the character and is now adept at playing the real-life characters. Yet, it is interesting to see the battle of performance between the two leads. Vijay Raaz as an archaeology officer (Gyanesh Shukla) and Brijendra Shukla (Mirza’s lawyer) adds fun moments to this dark satire.
Shoojit Sircar is a raconteur and shares the elixir of his story through engaging characters. In this case, its greed. His characters are often etched from reality and can’t always be labelled black or white. It’s the grey that makes his characters believable. The greed of every nature in Gulabo Sitabo develops from rhytides to wrinkles – more prominent as the story develops.
However, in Gulabo Sitabo, you feel that the cacophony of characters at times becomes an impediment in the story. There are characters and scenes one could have avoided and still told the story. Dialogues are real, grounded, and maintain the local flavour of the script.
Now if you wonder what is connect with the title? Shoojit uses the folk art form of puppetry to share the tale of two female puppets who are in a constant state of dramatic fights. The protagonists, Mirza and Baankey, are similar to Gulabo and Sitabo – who are focused on their greed, materialism and consumed by their endeavour to win the argument. But at what cost?
Gulabo Sitabo takes us back to our school days when greed was amongst the most-cited vices. Despite being a dramedy, it isn’t preachy. The pace of the film might remind you of Shoojit’s October, which had a romantic story at its heart but demanded the audience to be patient. Gulabo Sitabo drags in parts and is only salvaged by the merit of the director to keep it under two hours. For those who can wait for the story to take its time and develop, it works. For others, it doesn’t. Perhaps, Shoojit is aware and testing these crevices, but only the success of the film will tell how much he was able to convince the audience.
Watch Gulabo Sitabo movie officical trailer below:
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