Simran

The movie Simran is based on the life of a lady who had this weakness for robbing and gambling. In terms of creating characters with clear identity and space, this Hansal Mehta film is definitely a success. But there is a sensibility issue there in the film when it starts to show the robbery part as a very easy silly process. As the impact of that is critical in the story, you do find it as a shortcoming in a film that has cheerful energy to its credit.

Praful Patel is our leading lady. She does the house keeping job in a hotel. She is a divorcee who has a rough equation with her parents and Praf wants to move in to her own apartment and she is trying her best. In the midst of all these she goes to Vegas with her cousin. That changes the things drastically for Praful as that trip and things she did in that trip rattles all her plans. How she tries to tackle all those things is what Simran showing us.

Towards the climax of the film there is a scene where the cops arrest our leading lady and asks her what was the reason why she decided to make the police chase her? The answer is worth laughing out loud. Simran is more enjoyable when you look at the kind of feminism it is trying to project rather than looking at it as a perfectly realistic thriller story.  In the first twenty or twenty five minutes, the film very smoothly establishes the character of Praful. Through simple sequences Hansal shows us her attitude towards life. The two issues I found with the screenplay were that it takes an entire hour to get to that point where our protagonist is in trouble. And the second thing was the way which she was robbing the banks. I don’t know what really happened in the real story, but here it looked really silly. Saurabh Shukla in Barfi was much better as a police man when compared to the American cops in this film. Apoorva Asrani and Kangana who shares the writing credits for the film has managed to present the nuances of a middle class family in to the narrative. It helps the movie a lot in building characters and interesting sequences.

Kangana Ranaut is simply spectacular in being the character. The eccentricity and the dilemma of the character were played very skillfully by the actress. The character is comical when you look at the things she do, but Kangana keeps her in that real world and we could feel for the character. Sohum Shah, who had a memorable role in Ship of Theseus gets a good character in Simran and plays it elegantly. The combination scenes of him and Kangana had many subtle things that showed us the politics of the film. I couldn’t find the name of the actor who played Praful’s father’s role in the movie, but the actor was really good.

Hansal Mehta manages to keep the movie in that light hearted zone without losing the emotional core of the film. He keeps it real and has cracked the quirks effectively. The humanizing part was also done pretty neatly by the film maker. The problem here is with the way the screenplay goes. The lack of authenticity the film has in a critical area is slightly annoying for us as this film sort of deserved a careful and sensible presentation of events. There are numerous small sequences and scenes in the film that sort of makes the character of Praful quite endearing to us even when we know that she is flawed. The dialogues really help the movie in achieving that. Cinematography and cuts occasionally becomes a bit lazy. I really liked the title track of the film.

Simran has a screenplay that needed a lot of tweaks. But a captivating Kangana and the realistic making of Hansal Mehta add some quality to this film and thus it ends up as a cheerful movie with lots of memorable moments.

Rating: 3/5