GOLMAAL: Hotchpotch of love and action(Bangla)
Shoma A. Chatterji
Posted online: Friday , July 04, 2008 at 03:29:04
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Swapan Saha’s Golmaal has no resemblance with Hrishikesh Mukherjee rip-roaring comedy of the same name made many years ago. The only common ground the two films have is in its comedy of errors dished out in a David Dhawan style for the second half of the film. Swapan Saha does not care about a press preview or reviews following the film’s release because he can afford not to. His films tend to hit the jackpot in the suburbs and the rural areas never mind if we urban elites stick up our snooty noses at the kind of entertainment he dishes out in one film after another, making a record in the maximum number of releases within a year.
Rightly dubbed the David Dhawan of Bengali cinema, Saha could easily find a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for churning out quickie hits in the shortest possible time. He has his cast ready in his mind and then sits down to prepare a script picked straight out of some David Dhawan film, or a Govinda starrer, or a merry mix-and-match of some equally crude comic films if not soppy and tearful melodramas. Golmaal does begin with a Dhawan-like storyline but changes tracks to become a collaged plagiarisation of bits and slices from several Hindi films.
Prosenjit and Tota are buddy brothers who grow up to become the local toughies who bash up everyone at the drop of a hat, making for so much blood and gore that you begin to think what kind of film it is going to be. But then, Cupid strikes and the film becomes first a triangle and then a quadrangle, and comedy, if one can call it that, arrives in all its crude glory, complete with the hallmark of any Swapan Saha film. Prosenjit and Priyanka (Trivedi) are in love. Tota loves Namrata who loves Prosenjit. Tota however, thinks that Prosenjit is in love with Namrata. Abracadabra! He shifts his attention to the voluptuous Priyanka who does not know what to do except wear gaudy clothes and pretend to dance. Jisshu Sengupta is in love with Varsha, their sister. In his desperation to get their green signal, he makes a merry mess of this mix-and-match quadrangular love story. After many twists and turns that include Jisshu disguising himself as a cow - and blows into a rubber glove to create udders to fool the milkman, a la Hulchul. So, what’s wrong if everything ends happily ever after since all is fair in love and war?
Technical Expertise
What could have become a wonderful, taut and side-splitting laugh-riot becomes a terrible example of crass comedy packed with some good timing by Prosenjit whose potential for comedy has never been explored in the right way till date. The script is loosely strung with incidents coming one after another without a smooth transition from one to the next. What a brilliant actor like Rajatabha Dutta is doing in the film remains a mystery. Tota screams his way through. Jisshu has ample scope to deliver the gags that produce the laughs. The three pretty ladies throw up a lot of eye candy. Golmaal is a microcosm of Bengali mainstream cinema that has journeyed downhill from Ajoy Kar to Swapan Saha. Golmaal is a classic example of buffoonery on celluloid that could have done well had Swapan Saha used a bit of imagination and ingenuity instead of falling back on Bollywood films. Why every Bengali masala film must drag its feet to over two-and-a-half hours remains a mystery.
Verdict
The film deserves just one star for Prosenjit’s perfect sense of timing.
