Ghoomketu

There is a sequence in the new Nawazuddin Siddiqui movie Ghoomketu featuring Ranveer Singh and Sonakshi Sinha that sort of mocks the cheesiness in the typical mainstream Bollywood scripts. In that scene you can sense the satiric aspirations of the director Pushpendra Nath Misra and that should have been the core of this movie. But instead, Ghoomketu focuses way too much on the other characters and subplots making it a disappointing execution of an interesting thought.

The titular character Ghoomketu is a graduate in Hindi and he wanted to be a part of the local newspaper Gudgudhi. But when he was rejected from there, he decided to go to Mumbai to write movies. The life of Ghoomketu in Mumbai for 30 days and the life up to the moment he decided to go to Mumbai gets depicted in this 1 hour and 42 minutes movie.

The initial bits of the movie are way too disoriented. The movie somewhere feels like it is desperate to show the viewer that it has a wacky sense of humor. The narrative is going back and forth in order to establish the characters. But when you are investing way too much time in showing the history of multiple characters in a 100 minutes film, it takes away a lot of the soul element from the movie. Anurag Kashyap plays the role of a lazy cop and I am still clueless why they spent so much time showing the history of his character. They have even shot a whole sequence with Dacoits to show that past. There are so many such backstories in the movie including that of Ghoomketu’s uncle, and they all feel like useless additions due to either bad editing or poor screenplay writing.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui has the correct level of eccentricity one expects in a movie like this. Ghoomketu is a misfit in a place like Bollywood and he has the characteristics of a small-town guy. And Nawaz was able to portray those details effectively. Raghuvir Yadav as the loud Dadda was extremely hilarious. My favorite among the cast was Ila Arun as Santo Bua. Her performance and the writing of that character are perhaps the only real good things one can find in this messy experiment. I have loved Anurag Kashyap in Akira, but here he was disappointing. Swanand Kirkire was really nice as the Chacha.

Ghoomketu was completed in 2015 and it is director Pushpendra Nath Misra’s first feature film. The movie, written by Misra himself has no real strengths to its credit in terms of writing and making. Sometimes the events we see in a scene look like, the actors decided to ignore the script and have a ball. The editing of the movie makes it even clumsier as it sort of confuses us about the timeline. And this back and forth narrative was also not contributing much to the content of the movie. Just like I said in the beginning, if they had focused more on being a satire about the obsession of mainstream Bollywood towards mediocre content, this movie would have worked at least for those struggling writers and directors out there. But sadly Ghoomketu is cinematically unappealing and thus I can’t really think about any particular niche that will enjoy this film.

Some of the sequences in the movie, especially the ones that featured actress Ila Arun kind of had a peculiar humorous tone. By the time the movie ended, I sort of wished the movie had more such moments. There are too much eccentricity and too little excitement. The numerous cameos including that of Mr. Amitab Bachchan himself can’t really elevate the dud script.

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