In the early 1950s, when people of the new Independent India were getting restless and worried about the whole freedom thing, they were in dire need of something that would take their minds off it. Just then in the state of Uttar Pradesh, this art of glove puppetry was getting popular. The artists designed cloth made dolls and created stories for entertainment. The stories would mostly be a funny take on the social issues across the country. The very same artists also created a story about two women in a family – Sitabo, the overworked simple wife of a man, and Gulabo, the imposing mistress of the same man. The two characters were designed to be at loggerheads at each other. They became extremely popular and attracted huge crowds, as they brought many stories to life along with folk music, leaving viewers with extremely entertaining experiences.
This movie title is a tribute to the age old art of Glove Puppetry, a tribute to the famous “heroines” around the state of UP. (The movie has a couple of scenes of a real-life puppet master performing the art with songs and Gulabo-Sitabo in his hand).
The movie starts off with an old man stealing a light bulb from its socket and selling it off to nearby shop. We are introduced to Mirza (Amitabh Bachchan), a 78 year old man, bent on his shoulders due to age, sporting a uncarressed beard and a huge spectacles for compensating poor vision. Mirza is a stingy old man, is regarded as a greedy miser by people around him. He is married to Begum, who is 17 years elder to him. She is the owner of the mansion they live in, which she had inherited from her grandfather. The mansion though being very old and dilapidated, houses around 10-15 families living there for several years off a very meagre rent. Baankey (Ayushmann Khurrana) is one of the tenants in the mansion. He lives with his mother and three sisters.
Mirza feels these tenants are “parasites” who feed on his mansion for life and yet doesn’t give anything in return (read Rent here). The tenants do not cooperate with Mirza if he increases their rent, some of them do not even pay rent for a continuous three months by citing some reason or the other to skip rent. Mirza, in return, devises all sorts of devious plans to oust the tenants from the mansion. He even locks all the toilets in the mansion when Baankey knocks down the wall of their public toilet by mistake.
Mirza and Baankey are always at loggerheads between each other, just like the real Gulabo and Sitabo. There are a lot of cheeky exchanges between them that evoke a hearty chuckle. Mirza tries to make up Baankey’s mind to vacate this mansion. Mirza feels that Baankey, being a young man, is cleverly trying to get hold of the property. Hence, he starts introducing silly rules to aggravate Baankey. He steals his light bulbs, he puts in a daily parking fee for his bike, he threatens to not unlock the doors beyond a certain time during the night.
Baankey, on the other hand, keeps dismissing Mirza, for he feels that this poor old man has gone crazy. He just tramples past all of Mirza’s tantrums and keeps Mirza at bay always. He cleverly tries to fool Mirza that his family is in a very bad state, that his sister is sick, to avoid paying rent every month. He even puts in a rumour into Mirza’s ears making him believe that the mansion could give tonnes of gold if dug up, to which Mirza’s efforts go in vain after all the digging.
There is this one funny sequence where Baankey comes up to a very tired Mirza to request him to adopt him as his son. Mirza funnily retorts back asking Baankey to get out from his room. While leaving the room disappointed, Baankey finds that Mirza had stolen even his bedsheet. While taking it back, Baankey accuses Mirza for being such a cheap thief, to which Mirza happily mumbles to himself that he had farted on the bedsheet the whole day. Such is the banter between Mirza and Baankey. A lot of fun moments in the movie are due to the innocence of Mirza and the dismissive behaviour of Baankey on Mirza.
The movie itself has a lot of ordinary stuff infused, of course in a good way. The people are ordinary, more real than ordinary one could say, there is no forced love story that threads along the screenplay as is expected of such movies, there is no larger than life characters that save the people from their misery. The imagery of the dilapidated mansion and realistic capture of the lives at the mansion gives us the overwhelming feeling of being relatable. Just like how Shoojit Sircar‘s earlier movie Piku (remembering Irrfan Khan, RIP!!) made us fall in love with Kolkatta, the visual imageries in this movie capture the best of Lucknow and its people.
Amitabh Bachchan as Mirza is just pure. The kind of mannerisms that Amitabh brings into the character of Mirza is a delight to watch. The wittiness coupled with the innocence of an age old man comes as a relief to the relief to the viewers during such tough times. The wittiness is not over the top though, but is something that is genuinely funny, that you see happening around you everyday with your grandparents or even with old people living in your neighborhood. Mirza’s crooked mind that keeps devising evil plans to become the sole owner of the mansion, is so evident in the beautiful eyes of Amitabh, even though those are behind an overly lensed spectacle and highly carrying make-up.
Ayushmann Khurrana as a poor tenant is just good enough for the story to move forward. The character is designed to be someone who isn’t as heroic as their family or his girlfriend expects him to be, but it wasn’t quite there to be impactful. A special mention to the lisp that Baankey has, it is just so good that you wonder whether Ayushmann Khurrana really has it and has been trying to hide from us all these years.
The movie as a whole, however, could have been made a little more interesting towards the end. Though the movie has a very good premise to start off with, even with a slowly building screenplay that excites us as to how the dispute between the two parties would be resolved, even with all those funny banters between Mirza and Baankey, but weak writing lets the movie down big time. The movie is definitely good in parts, but as a whole, the movie seems to be quite “ordinary”, ends up being in the just-another-movie category with not-so-impressive ending.
The set-up takes time during the first one hour (which is understandable in such movies), which leads us to the dispute, but the characters seldom move forward, they seem to be beating around the bush with one party demanding original papers from Mirza and the other side, the archeological department, visiting the mansion for research. The way the dispute is resolved by a surprise “Third Party” was actually funny to begin with, but it turned out to be a little too absurd for the movie hold on to.
As for the imageries of the dilapidated mansion, it is a reminder that anything and everything would eventually grow old and fragile, that we will have to move away or move on from it when the time is due. Even the character of Baankey’s girlfriend reiterates this fact. She sees nothing in Baankey once she realizes that he does not want to improve himself financially and intellectually. She moves on to someone better, someone more rich, someone more respected, someone more welcomed by the society.
Similar to this, everything, unless improved financially and intellectually, will not sustain its life, even though it was once celebrated by people around it. For instance, the age old art forms have been facing a huge deficit in recent times as the films and movies have taken over the entertainment industry. People have very reduced attention span to the things that interest them, let alone things that do not interest them. Hence, one has to be adaptive enough to improve their skills and knowledge to resurrect the flailing art forms to this current generation.