Prodno Sixart

First of all, apologies to Ms. Gurinder Chadha. Big fan of Marathi cinema here. Started watching Jhimma and felt like I had seen it before. Where? It’s Bhaji On The Beach with a Marathi twist. It’s Phatphata In Paddington! There is nothing original about this film. While the intention might have been there, the execution went into hibernation. None of the characters have any depth that the talented actors can exploit. They are reduced to models plugging products. The blatant brand plugging is deplorable, especially the one for the sanitary pads and the maps app. London has ample street signage, people who speak English and an excellent transit system but the inexplicably scared widow of an investment banker behaves like she was abandoned on top of a Patagonian mountain top. What rock was she hiding under all these years? The runaway grandmother could have been such a great character exploration but it fizzles out into an insipid side role. The chirpy, bubbly, carefree young girl should have been run over by a London bus - would have saved the viewers a lot of migraines. The confused fashion designer with the wannabe Cyndi Lauper fashion sense and her passive aggressive mother are about as deep as a pizza dish. And why is the Marathi girl who married the Gujarati boy even there? The tour guide looks like he walked into the wrong movie set. Initially we thought he was a creepy stalker type person. And then there is this mysterious individula who carries around a fake sunflower throughout the film. Seems like a complete waste of time and resources. The only saving grace is the aamdaar’s wife - she is pure gold. Natural, carefree and infectiously hilarious. Jhimma is not a movie really, it’s a series of very bad ads strung together with a rope of weak emotional angles and pointless characters. Nothing seems to fit together. The direction is haphazard, the cinematography is downright boring, the wardrobe is underfunded, the art is absent, the music is all over the place and the editing is inexplicable. Suffice to say, Jhimma is like buying a fancy tin of cookies only to find expired generic brand dog biscuits inside it. Don’t waste your time and bandwidth on this film. Instead watch something original like Valu, Shwaas or Balak Palak where the makers actually used their intelligence and imagination to drive home a point.

Better if you watch the German original “Lola Rennt” or “Run Lola Run” in English. Tom Twyker shattered so many ceilings with that film. It’s an absolute masterpiece. This tacky remake, if you can call it that, isn’t even half a percent of what the original was. Aakash Bhatia, an otherwise talented director, lifted everything as is and dropped it in Goa in the hope of making an Indian döner kebab, but instead ended up with an undercooked sorpotel. Yash Khanna’s cinematography is technically excellent, as usual, but it submits to the same camera techniques as the original - nothing innovative there. The music feels like Spotify’s AI developed a serious bug and made up an inexplicable playlist that mortifies the ears. It would not be fair to criticise the actors caught in this chaos, but Tapsee seems to be out of breath even when not running and Tahir looks like he needs Eno - stat! It breaks my heart to see the remake of a path breaking original become such a basket case. And what’s with calling Mapusa as “Napusa” and Dona Paula as “Paula Dona”? Did the makers think that we wouldn’t recognise that the film was shot in Goa? Whose genius idea in legal was that? Julia weds Robert? Really? One can understand sub texts, but this one is just sub standard text. Why does Netflix do stuff like this? If you wanted to butcher the film, you could have just bought a DVD, laid it out in your office parking lot and run your corporate cars over it a couple of times. Twyker took the abstraction of time loop and made it exciting. Bhatia loops the abstraction into a brain aneurism. Suffice to say, this film is a waste of time, attention, electricity and bandwidth. Watch a cat video or something on YouTube to cleanse the palate if you were able to make it to the end credits.