Film: "Chashme Baddoor";
Cast: Rishi Kapoor, Lilette Dubey, Ali Zafar, Siddharth, Divyendu Sharma, Taapsee Pannu and Anupam Kher;
Director: David Dhawan;
Rating: ***1/2
"Dum hai, Boss!" - the perky young Miss Congeniality in David Dhawan's "Chashme Baddoor", a far cry from the shastriya sangeet trainee tutti fruti-eating Deepti Naval in Sai Paranjpye's film, exclaims whenever she is impressed by her loverboy's dialogue-baazi.
Exclamation marks are the only punctuations in this seamless comedy of courtship played at an impossibly high octave, without getting shrill.
'Farce' things first. Barring the core theme of two friends maliciously nipping the third friend's romance in the bud, and some mischievous sequences and characters from the original, which have been entirely re-interpreted as 'swines of the times', Dhawan's "Chashme Baddoor" is far(ce) removed from Paranjpye's original.
Those were days of relative innocence. Whistling at girls at bus stops, chasing unwilling girls to their homes, and landing up at their doorstep under assumed identities were all considered innocuous bachelor bacchanalia. In Paranjpye's "Chashme Buddoor", it was a big deal that Rakesh Bedi managed to get into Deepti Naval's bathroom pretending to be a plumber.
In Dhawan's film, the very gifted Divyendu Sharma, who plays Bedi's part, just can't pretend to know the perky girl next-door intimately by her bathroom decor. He manages to take a picture of a tattoo on her waist to convince his love-smitten pal Sid (Ali Zafar) that the girl is... well, not chaste but quite a 'chalu cheez'.
While the writing gets 'chalu', it miraculously steers clear of being cheesy by a wide margin.
