Friday, May 19, 2017

Review: HINDI MEDIUM


It's fun, but the joke doesn't have legs...

2 stars

Mini Review:

Getting a child admitted to the best school can be a circus at the best of times. At the worst, it requires all kinds of sacrifices from parents who aren’t ‘elite’. Irrfan Khan and Saba Qamar learn a lot of hard lessons of life on the way, with the help of Deepak Dobriyal. The film starts out on a right note but the need to teach you a lesson is pushed and pushed in your face until you are weary.

Main Review:

Irrfan Khan and Saba Qamar are childhood sweethearts from Chandni Chowk. He has a large clothing store and she takes care of their home and their child Pia who is now ready to be sent to school.

She’s fun to watch, with her character finicky about the child eating right, not watching too much tv, playing right (you laugh out loud when you see her sanitise the slide in the park!). But she has ambitions for her child. And the ambitions include getting the child admitted to the best school in Delhi.

Irrfan Khan plays the loving husband, drives the wife to the schools that look more like fancy hotels rather than schools. But at her insistence he moves bag and baggage to a fancy neighborhood so they fulfil the residential requirement that will enable the child admission to a fancy school.

Now Irrfan Khan is a good actor, but you see red flags go up when he begins to overdo the ‘acting’ as they leave Chandni Chowk and he laments over Kulche Chhole. The script takes us to the travails of this wealthy but very clearly ‘Hindi Medium’ family attempting to fit into ‘posh’ society. Your jaw drops as the madness to get the child into a good school is pushed further and further and you like when Deepak Dobriyal shows up on the screen as neighbor. The humanity and the way of life is fun up to a point, but you are exhausted by things like ‘kill the Dengue mosquito by humming like female mosquito’ which are meant to be funny.

By the time the lessons are learnt and the hearts transformed, you as audience is exhausted. The last lesson of how poor kids deserve a good school too is tiresome. Sabah Qamar is beautiful and unlike TV actors who have not really made a mark on the big screen, she actually shines. Irrfan Khan starts out as a fun guy but tends to ham, ham and ham some more. Deepak Dobriyal is as good as ever. Tillotama Shome hammers home the role of a supercilious prep school head and you shudder because such people exist and terrify new parents as they get desperate to get their kids admitted to good schools.

This movie could have been great had it not tried to teach the lesson so hard. But Irrfan Khan and Saba Qamar in ‘branded’ clothes and blingy accessories will make you smile.



  
(this review appears on nowrunning dot com)

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