| CULTURE & SOCIETY |
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SPOILERS AHEAD |
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From
Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 26, Dated 30 June 2012 |
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| CULTURE & SOCIETY |
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SPOILERS AHEAD |
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Tripping Goody Two-Shoes
By Shone Satheesh Babu
FERRARI KI SAWAARI is not about the eponymous sports car. It’s not about the poignancy of the love a father bears his son. It could have been about cricket, but it’s not. This is simply a story about testing the boundaries of goodness. Clumsy, stuttering, wimpy, Rustam ( Sharman Joshi) is an RTO clerk, a beta male whose fortitude only comes to the fore for his family. When Kayo, his gifted son, is selected for a cricket camp at Lord’s, England, to play with Sachin Tendulkar, Rustam struggles to find the financing. But apart from the invocation of the Little Master, this movie is entirely unpredictable; in one twist, you think a new bat will salvage the match, but it’s a worn-out shoe that ends up being Kayo’s Achilles heel!
Kayo’s grandfather Deboo (Boman Irani), like Anupam Kher in Bend It Like Beckham, is an iconic former cricketer embittered by his own experience of the game. Irani, that purveyor of locutions par excellence, gives us goosebumps with his portrayal of a laconic tyrant. His vicious one-liners in Marathi decimate any argument Rustam makes for his son’s passion: “Cricket captain? You throw a ball out this window and it will land on a cricket captain!”
In an adjacent universe, a local politician-cum-thug is captivated by a 560 horsepower Ferrari, and is willing to pay any sum of money to acquire it for a day. That Deboo’s cricketing ties and a Ferrari will lead to Sachin Tendulkar is a connection hiding in plain sight. We even travel to Sachin’s residence only to leave from his front door in another clever cinematic twist.
The banter between Sachin’s man friday and security guard over the missing Ferrari and their mission to find it is hilarious. But from here, the script plays out like the IPL, with excitement and distractions aplenty but a little lacking in substance and coherence.
Vidya Balan’s flashy number remains the only memorable song sequence in the film. Ritwik Sahore, who plays Kayo, is a rare find, travelling the pitfalls of the plot with grit sculpted onto his face. The many brilliant twists literally take Rustam’s principled goodness for a ride. But the bends and the bumps of the storyline need a stronger suspension of disbelief than this star vehicle for Sharman Joshi has.
Shone Satheesh Babu is an assistant copy editor with Tehelka.
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