Jugjugg Jeeyo Movie Review: Back to basics/B’wood

Jugjugg JeeyoUA Family dramaDir Raj MehtaCast Varun Dhawan Anil Kapoor Neetu Kapoor Kiara AdvaniRating355This film is what yoursquod call the quintessential lsquofamily entertainerrsquo to be watched by the desi familyunit boodhe bachche jawan mdash not necessarily in separate corners of the cinema hall And yet the theme is totally adult In the sense that it deals with divorce and infidelity oldage infatuation and younglove destroyedThe treatment may well be that of a sex comedy And yet at no point does the picture feel cheapassed salacious even with lines on lsquotharakrsquo horniness mdash never devolving into a Dil Ka Doctor type sex farce This probably has a lot to do with the director Raj Mehta and the camerarsquos gazeWatch VideoItrsquos also the story of a father and son mdash both of whom are simultaneously seeking divorce from their wives The father at a pivotal scene in this picture takes his son along to a movie theatre to reveal something of utmost importance The hall is emptyThe flop movie playing in the hall is Kalank And I just wondered for a sec what this father might feel about a lookalike of his son playing the hero in the film that hersquos taken him to watchAnil Kapoor plays the dad His son is Varun Dhawan the lead in Kalank right This is of course a selfreferentialmeta moment in this movie Like Kalank Jugjugg Jeeyo is a Dharma production perhaps their first theatrical release since the pandemic They premiered even a fullon war movie Shershaah and one headlined byDeepika Padukone Gehraiyaan directly on OTT right before thisIn that vein this is designed as a pretty paisavasool kinda massy entertainer To what extent is it inclusiveexciting enough to draw in crowds nationally of course is none of our business as regular viewersIn a very lsquoGovindarsquo way that comes so naturally to him Dhawan plays a callow fellow called Kuku a bouncer at a nightclub He perennially waits to get wasted or otherwise before breaking into long dialoguebaazi only when hersquos in public at a courtroom or a wedding banquetThe Deepikalike luminous but altogether reserved Kiara Advani is his wife in a loveless marriage while the couple must pretend things are fine between them mdash for the family theyrsquore visiting back home over a big fat desi weddingThe story starts off in Patiala heads over to lsquoKanaydarsquo and back to Patiala for multiple pegs of rich urban Punjab For what is the biggest subset of Bollywood if not Punjabiregional going mainstream mdash the other subset lately comprising the Uttar Pradesh smalltown movies noBetween the two Punjabi drunken fun is obviously far more viscerally entertaining mdash fellows yelling lsquohadipparsquo for a background score the soundtrack comprising every Punjabi genre from hiphop dance even bhajan to the semiclassical lsquotapparsquo mdash between gags after gagsReally whatrsquos there not to love in a film going back to basics or lsquoBollywoodrsquo as it were What do I mean by that essentially Foremost the music as you can tellItrsquos been a while since we simply tapped feet in a theatre pretty much all through I donrsquot get why Bollywood soundtracks arenrsquot heavily promoted as they used to be in the past mdash so you donrsquot have to discover tracks along with a movie I know the fairly average dance number lsquoNaach Punjabanrsquo here is originally by the Pakistani Abrar Ul HaqBut since you might miss it let me call your attention to the superior slow sombre song lsquoTum jo gayersquo within the first 20 minutes of this film Full disclosure Itrsquos composed by Pozy one of Bombayrsquos best guitarists in the indie scene and my childhood friend Also the reason Irsquove been humming it for almost a year Glad itrsquos outComing back to the picture per se where everyone deliberately plays it up for the laughs mdash itrsquos really the interplay between the four lead characters that makes it workThe warm genteel Neetu Kapoor provides it the dramatic centre Looking at her ace scenes with long passages itrsquos a loss to humanity that wersquore seeing her in a film after almost a decade and that we lost her from the screen at her prime in the early rsquo80sThe one more obviously overpowering this show no points for guessing is Anil Kapoor 65 indisputably Indiarsquos youngest sexagenarian If 60s in his case is indeed the new 40s mdash itrsquos not a surprise that a midlife crisis must visit a character played by him in a film Which is probably why he agreed to play a proper lsquoBollywood dadrsquoItrsquos just that this is also such a fantastic plotdriven script Rishabh Sharma that itrsquos hard to accurately tell the motivations of characters in terms of why they do what they do mdash Anilrsquos is the hardest to getShould it have remained a cranked up sexcom alone and this dad would make more sense then Maybe Does the film seem too verbose at the same time explaining itself on occasion SurelyCan you tell the twists beforehand though I couldnrsquot Does the gagfest work pretty much all through then Hell yeah Could so do with this frivolous corny fluff chuckling in a dark hall Have missed this sorta stuff for long manAlso Read Neetu Kapoor gets emotional at Jug Jugg Jeeyo trailer launch I wish Chintuji was here