CHALO DILLI  | Critic's Rating: Cast: Lara Dutta, Vinay Pathak Direction: Shashant Shah Genre: Drama Duration: 2 hours Readers Rating: |
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Gripping road movie
Story: Manu Gupta (Vinay Pathak) and Mihika Mukherjee (Lara Dutta) are the most mismatched traveling partners who are forced to journey together fromMumbai to Delhi, when fate (or is it the maddening Mumbai traffic) pits them together. Mihika is an uptown investment banker. Manu is a saree trader from Chandni Chowk. It takes an arduous trip from Jaipur to Delhi for the two of them to bridge their cultural and class divide.
Story: Manu Gupta (Vinay Pathak) and Mihika Mukherjee (Lara Dutta) are the most mismatched traveling partners who are forced to journey together fromMumbai to Delhi, when fate (or is it the maddening Mumbai traffic) pits them together. Mihika is an uptown investment banker. Manu is a saree trader from Chandni Chowk. It takes an arduous trip from Jaipur to Delhi for the two of them to bridge their cultural and class divide.
Movie Review: The story may be simple, straight and sprinkled with all the predictable twists and turns you can envisage in a drama that pitches a snooty, spoilt woman against a desi Indian male. There is the usual upturned nose on the part of Lara when she is forced to encounter the dust bowls of mofussil India, which include suffering her down-market companions burps and farts. And there is Vinay Pathak's familiar disdain for the lady's la-di-dah ways. Also, there are shades of the other cult road movie, Jab We Met, which cloud the originality of the script.
But hey, the film has so much soul, specially in the climax, it makes up for any shortcomings in story and vision. Also, the narrative has a sweet simplicity which transports you into the onscreen journey and makes you a willing witness to the bond-building between `bhaisaheb' and `behenji'. If Lara Dutta andVinay Pathak carry the film through with their spontaneity, it is the fringe characters too who add spunk to the road show. And in case you need some more masala, there's Yana Gupta reinventing Zeenat Aman's classic item number `Laila o Laila'. Needless to say, Zeenat had more dum....
But hey, the film has so much soul, specially in the climax, it makes up for any shortcomings in story and vision. Also, the narrative has a sweet simplicity which transports you into the onscreen journey and makes you a willing witness to the bond-building between `bhaisaheb' and `behenji'. If Lara Dutta andVinay Pathak carry the film through with their spontaneity, it is the fringe characters too who add spunk to the road show. And in case you need some more masala, there's Yana Gupta reinventing Zeenat Aman's classic item number `Laila o Laila'. Needless to say, Zeenat had more dum....
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