Kaagaz Ke Fools

Director: Anil Kumar Chaudhury

Cast: Vinay Pathak, Raima Sen, Mugdha Godse and Saurabh Shukla

What if someone recorded the bickering fights of your noisy neighbor couple on video, burned it on a DVD and gave it to you to watch? That would approximately be the same scenario as buying a ticket for Kaagaz Ke Fools. The fact that this film is a near namesake to Guru Dutt’s Kaagaz Ke Phool is both an aberration and abomination of cinema. In an arduous one hour and forty minutes, this film unravels nothing but some senile behavior between an odd couple. Near the end, it does conjure up remotely relevant themes of love and art, but it’s a classic case of too little too late.

Vinay Pathak plays an honest writer called Purushottam, struggling to get his first novel printed. Mugdha Godse plays his wife Nikki and the sole purpose of her life seems to be to get her husband to become a successful author. In a bid to inspire her all too earnest husband, Nikki more often than not, ends up poking him the wrong way. It’s the archetypal middle-class Indian household. There’s not enough money, a bevy of aspirations and love constantly choking under the pressures of finance and social pressure. Mistake this not for some neorealism inspired art. This film and its morosely pedantic script are more uninspiring than some of our soap operas. Roughly, that comes down to seeing two actors play husband and wife for 100 minutes straight. Not a very inspiring proposition.

The story does have other distractions. There’s a gambling den, a prostitute seeking attention, a group of friends, writing risqué novels and stuff. None of it makes any difference on the entertainment value of the movie. The pace drags along, the screenplay does nothing but repeat on loop the fact that Purushottam can’t get his novel published. And that his wife can’t deal with his failures. The pairing of Mugdha Godse and Vinay Pathak doesn’t quite make sense either. Raima Sen, playing the prostitute though offers a bit of spark. She looks beautiful and her odd sense of chemistry with Pathak works as well. But that’s about it. Even Saurabh Shukla is wasted in a horribly clichéd role.

Questionable casting aside, the production values on this movie are near abysmal. Most of the film is shot in Delhi. But the choice of locations is poor. The camerawork is no better than rookie documentaries. And the songs are neither pleasant on the ear nor needed in the film. Yet, they’re thrust into the most absurd situations. It’s a very lackluster attempt at making a commercial film.