Review - Khosla ka Ghosla: Your standards decide how much you like a movie

An average middle class family has to bend rules and give-up on its ideologies to achieve a very simple goal. And there is always the generation gap to deal with. That’s serious stuff. The name of the movie is hilarious. The posters and the one promotional song that I had seen made it look like a slapstick comedy. Hardly…it is not even borderline-comedy! Not surprising, considering the movie is produced by an advertising agency. They really cannot exist without misleading marketing!

Overall, the movie is a quite dull. There is something right about the execution, though. It is admirable that Dibakar Banerjee kept the characters simple and carefully avoided the glitter and glamour, the song and dance. Some parts are handled pretty well. For example, the way a dream is used to show a facet of a character; the way different characters react to an announcement that a member of their family is going to the US; the way props are used to intimidate characters; the way IIT-Delhi T-shirts are used instead of GAP. But then, ordinary characters that you can identify with…get boring! It lacks the intensity, the crispness, needed to make a movie out of the subject.

The plot does not help too much either, nothing exciting happens through the movie. If the story had a couple twists, it could have kept the interest alive. Thankfully, the songs that play in the background, help break the monotony. Watch out for some good performances though. Anupam Kher makes your heart go out for Mr. Khosla. I especially liked Navin Nischol’s role and the way he has played it. Parveen Dabbas, Tara Sharma, and Ranvir Shorey show how they are learning with experience.

Boman Irani plays a creepy property dealer. Now, the way this character is presented is irritating. For one, it is the character inconsistency. In the first half he had this street-smart personality and in the second half the simplest person pulled wool over his eyes. Then there is the acting itself. Boman Irani does this thing with his left nostril and smirks, to make him look his character. It worked for the first minute of screen time, but that’s how his nostril and half-lip stayed through the movie. In his opening shot, he has this cool lighting on the lower half of his face and bottom-up camera angle that makes him look sinister. But then the same effect is used on other characters and it loses its significance.

While we are on photography, the wide angle is over-used. Also, it is annoying when the expressions of a character change between the close-up shot and a zoom-out in the same shot but from a different angle. Maybe, it is all deliberate and had a purpose in the larger scheme of things. But if while watching the movie, I have time to think about what the cameraman is doing, then, either the cameraman is not doing his job right or the director.