Subhash K. Jha speaks about Golmaal Returns

Subhash K. Jha speaks about Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!

Oye!... This is one helluva lucky-lucky film about a lucky-lucky chor who nonchalantly enters Delhi's well-to-do homes, picks up television sets and sound systemsâ¦and walks out in broad daylight as though 'baap ka maal' - a coinage invented for our super-chor hero Lucky. Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! is a sly shimmering mirror of a dysfunctional society always craving for more more more...not knowing where the greed to be upwardly mobile finally becomes immobile. You could look for parallels to Banerjee's aggressively- original vision in crime capers ranging from Arthur Penn's Bonnie & Clyde to Shaad Ali's Bunty Aur Babli. You may also discern enchanting elements from the quirky crime capers of Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers in the guru-chela relationship between the thief Deol and his mentor Paresh Rawal. But finally, the all-consuming wanna-have impulses of the Indian middleclass , their craving to be seen on television and their desire to be heard above the din of the daily stand out above the cliches and derivations that are deliberately used to tell the story...Yup, Dibakar knows his Delhi in and out. The narration cluttered with colliding values, is miraculously liberated from the claustrophobia of middleclass ambitions to take us on a joyous bumpy caper ride. Not for a second do we feel the weight of the morality tale that lurks under the crowded front of the middleclass need for roti, caper aur makaan. Delhi's lower middleclass suburbs with their toasted lanes and brick edifices are used to create a famished environment for our adolescent hero Lucky (played with cool cunning by newcomer Manjot Singh) to be born in a state of abject wanting and craving. By the time Lucky grows up, so does the narrative. Dibakar Banerjee steers diametrically away from the format he had adopted in his first film Khosla Ka Ghosla. There's no room for or patience with explanations here. Lucky grows up kicking and dragging into the jolly joyride that's his jawaani ki kahaani The trick is to make his theft and crime not look like too much fun. The director cleverly and wisely reserves all judgment. Lucky's life on the run is neither glamorous nor too much fun. Nor is it squalid. This detachment from the scene(s) of the crime is what sets Oye Lucky... apart from other crime capers. Then there's the casting. Faces that you might or might not have seen before blend into the bristling brew of laughter lies and betrayal. Take the girl who plays Neetu Chandra's embittered excitable sister. She can be anybody or nobody and therefore special to the requirement of this film about trying to stand out in a crowd. Or the lady who plays Archana Puran Singh's next-door neighbour. Her reactions as Lucky empties his car of (stolen) valuables are probably worth more than the luxury goods being offloaded on the street. Archana Puran Singh and Paresh Rawal as an unctuous Punjabi couple sweet-talking the rather-naive Lucky into investing for a restaurant project are dead-on. Rawal, in fact puts in three bravura performances as three different characters who play a part in shaping Lucky's destiny. Abhay Deol's Everyman act is constantly laced with a streak of mean lean wickedness. He doesn't act. He just lets his character be. Deol isn't afraid of being embarrassed. Watch how he slobbers all over his kid-brother during a holiday with his girlfriend. Neetu Chandra, superb earlier as the street hawker in Madhur Bhandarkar's Traffic Signal, gets the point completely. She stays underplayed in an unwritten part. Cinematic conventions from the 1970s surface in waves of wacky adventurousness. Vinod Khanna and one of his song 'Chahiye Thoda Pyar' from the film Lahu Ke Do Rang recur to indicate periodicity. The bigger picture clearly lies in the honest detailing in this tongue-in-cheek caper about coveting the good things of life. Though no one is around to define what the "good things" are. Oye Lucky... gets savagely funny at times. Check out the sequence where Lucky tows a (stolen) television into a wayward politician's son's home, only to find every largish corner occupied by television sets. A sure sign of materialistic surfeit in a film that maintains a clear economy of expression often at the risk of continuity. Look closely into Oye Lucky... you can see where our society took the wrong turn.
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