[Contains spoilers, many of them.]
It’s really hard to not know where Nitesh Tiwari’s “Chhichhore” is headed fifteen minutes in. A man prances around naked in the corridors of a boys’ hotel, and before we know it a water fight has begun. Two boys become five, then ten, then twenty. In five minutes, everyone is soaked but stoked; it’s a ritual of sorts and it’s done. The boys pledge their allegiance to one another. There we go, another year, another film about friendship in college. Which wouldn’t be an entirely bad thing in more assured hands; consider the charming airiness of Abbas Tyrewala’s “Jaane Tu… Ya Jaane Na” for a moment. But “Chhichhore” goes the other way; the approach to the dog-eared material here is deliberately—or at least seemingly so—heavy-handed, confirming quite simply that it is going to be that type of movie.
And that type of movie gets a fresh coat every five years or so, seldom an upgrade. “Chhichhore” tries to get the best bits of “Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar” (itself a loose remake of the terrific “Breaking Away”), “Student of the Year” and “3 Idiots” to work furiously together. But little does work. When their son tries to commit suicide after failing in an exam, Anirudh (Sushant Singh Rajput) and Maya (Shraddha Kapoor) reach into their past for a story that underlines why failing isn’t necessarily bad. And into the past we dash, where we meet a young Anirudh, a brilliant student (aren’t they all?) condemned to hostel H4 on his first day of college. H4 is reputed to be stocked with slackers, bad rooms, and bad food. And yet Anirudh warms up to his peers, a small group of lazy stereotypes: Sexa, a porn addict; Bewda, an alcoholic; Acid, a foulmouth; Derek, a chain-smoking shirker; and Mummy, a mouse. There is, predictably, an attempt to squeeze humour out of these bare descriptions, but it is forced, delivered consciously, like an obligation that must be met. We never meet the men, though; we never know what they are thinking unless they articulate it, and we never see them vulnerable or nervous like regular engineering undergrads. (I missed terribly the shaggy, smirking architecture students of Pradip Krishen’s “In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones,” who viewed the world through defeated, bored eyes.)
After we meet the group, we meet Maya. Anirudh is smitten, and with him, everyone else. He tries to woo her (thankfully without a song) and fails, fails miserably. This romantic angle oughtn’t have felt so disposable, because it does contains a pleasant moment or two, but it does, for the actors play it blandly. By this point, “Chhichhore” has barely set off but already feels like a patchwork of fail-safe elements threaded together by a clumsy craftsman. We are also introduced to Raggie (played by Prateik Babbar), the conceited (unofficial) leader of H3, the chicest hostel on campus, who will eventually end up challenging the boys of H4 in the General Championships, the annual sporting competition in which the hostels compete against each other. It wouldn’t come as a surprise to me if I was told Raggie idolised Shekhar from “Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar” as a kid; for the most part I couldn’t tell the two apart. Raggie spites the boys of H4 by calling them ‘losers’ (which, for some reason, is supposed to be a barb and not a precise classification) in a way not different from how Shekhar called the boys of a lesser college ‘pyjama-chaap’.
After breezing through the imperatives of the Hindi college comedy (with scenes of ragging, a joke about hostel food, and a stray comment about how friends in college end up being family), “Chhichhore” trains its attention on the General Championships. The boys of H4 are desperate to win: for Derek, who may not get another shot at glory, but chiefly to obliterate the ‘losers’ tag that has tacked itself to them. This is familiar territory, at times too familiar: the parallels with “Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar” are far too many to be an innocent coincidence. (At one point, the final minutes of a relay race are a frame-by-frame copy of the climactic minutes of the last race in the Aamir Khan-starrer.) There’s even a flicker of “Lagaan” here: the boys of H4 are embarrassingly bad, and the smug boys of H3 exceptionally good, and so, in keeping with the rest of the film, the impending clash leaves us little to look forward to. The underdog tale has been redrafted several times, most imaginatively “Lagaan,” which fashioned a spectacle out of an absurd story; “Chhichhore,” I am afraid, does not follow suit. It uses nostalgia to smoothen out its narrative creases, and while that approach works only intermittently, it throws up several questions, the most important of which is: What in this film is novel? The answer, I suppose, would be: Little. Nostalgia, after all, can only do so much. And with it gone, a blandness begins to infect the narrative. “Chhichhore” hits the few highs we expect it to (thanks to sincere turns from the supporting cast) and the lows, but it falls short in surprising us. It is further weighed down by its constant jumps in time, between the present, where Anirudh and his friends recount the story of the General Championships to Anirudh’s coma-bound son, and the past, where Anirudh and his friends strategise to win. This is crucial in explaining the occasional narrative lumpiness: the present is contrived, the past rather chirpy.
With its ambitions neatly outlined at the start of the second-half, it’s disappointing indeed to see “Chhichhore” retreating to the comfort of predictability. Save for a couple of spirited jokes, most of it is spent sermonising. Where a line ought to have sufficed to establish something, the film employs four, said by different characters in different ways. And just to ram the point home, someone repeats it later again, in the plainest possible terms. But in its final minutes, in spite of determinedly sticking to what appears to be a riskless formula, it does spring a little surprise, one that, when I went back to it later, I would never have guessed was coming. It is not everyday that we see a Hindi film that accepts failure as an important (if not integral) part of growing up, and somehow manages to make it uplifting and wise, but “Chhichhore” does so—quietly, skilfully. Although these concluding minutes are dusted in sugar, there is a bittersweetness to them, a rare sort of bittersweetness. God knows this film could have done with more of it. But at least it's a start.
[Not For Reproduction]
It’s really hard to not know where Nitesh Tiwari’s “Chhichhore” is headed fifteen minutes in. A man prances around naked in the corridors of a boys’ hotel, and before we know it a water fight has begun. Two boys become five, then ten, then twenty. In five minutes, everyone is soaked but stoked; it’s a ritual of sorts and it’s done. The boys pledge their allegiance to one another. There we go, another year, another film about friendship in college. Which wouldn’t be an entirely bad thing in more assured hands; consider the charming airiness of Abbas Tyrewala’s “Jaane Tu… Ya Jaane Na” for a moment. But “Chhichhore” goes the other way; the approach to the dog-eared material here is deliberately—or at least seemingly so—heavy-handed, confirming quite simply that it is going to be that type of movie.
And that type of movie gets a fresh coat every five years or so, seldom an upgrade. “Chhichhore” tries to get the best bits of “Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar” (itself a loose remake of the terrific “Breaking Away”), “Student of the Year” and “3 Idiots” to work furiously together. But little does work. When their son tries to commit suicide after failing in an exam, Anirudh (Sushant Singh Rajput) and Maya (Shraddha Kapoor) reach into their past for a story that underlines why failing isn’t necessarily bad. And into the past we dash, where we meet a young Anirudh, a brilliant student (aren’t they all?) condemned to hostel H4 on his first day of college. H4 is reputed to be stocked with slackers, bad rooms, and bad food. And yet Anirudh warms up to his peers, a small group of lazy stereotypes: Sexa, a porn addict; Bewda, an alcoholic; Acid, a foulmouth; Derek, a chain-smoking shirker; and Mummy, a mouse. There is, predictably, an attempt to squeeze humour out of these bare descriptions, but it is forced, delivered consciously, like an obligation that must be met. We never meet the men, though; we never know what they are thinking unless they articulate it, and we never see them vulnerable or nervous like regular engineering undergrads. (I missed terribly the shaggy, smirking architecture students of Pradip Krishen’s “In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones,” who viewed the world through defeated, bored eyes.)
After we meet the group, we meet Maya. Anirudh is smitten, and with him, everyone else. He tries to woo her (thankfully without a song) and fails, fails miserably. This romantic angle oughtn’t have felt so disposable, because it does contains a pleasant moment or two, but it does, for the actors play it blandly. By this point, “Chhichhore” has barely set off but already feels like a patchwork of fail-safe elements threaded together by a clumsy craftsman. We are also introduced to Raggie (played by Prateik Babbar), the conceited (unofficial) leader of H3, the chicest hostel on campus, who will eventually end up challenging the boys of H4 in the General Championships, the annual sporting competition in which the hostels compete against each other. It wouldn’t come as a surprise to me if I was told Raggie idolised Shekhar from “Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar” as a kid; for the most part I couldn’t tell the two apart. Raggie spites the boys of H4 by calling them ‘losers’ (which, for some reason, is supposed to be a barb and not a precise classification) in a way not different from how Shekhar called the boys of a lesser college ‘pyjama-chaap’.
After breezing through the imperatives of the Hindi college comedy (with scenes of ragging, a joke about hostel food, and a stray comment about how friends in college end up being family), “Chhichhore” trains its attention on the General Championships. The boys of H4 are desperate to win: for Derek, who may not get another shot at glory, but chiefly to obliterate the ‘losers’ tag that has tacked itself to them. This is familiar territory, at times too familiar: the parallels with “Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar” are far too many to be an innocent coincidence. (At one point, the final minutes of a relay race are a frame-by-frame copy of the climactic minutes of the last race in the Aamir Khan-starrer.) There’s even a flicker of “Lagaan” here: the boys of H4 are embarrassingly bad, and the smug boys of H3 exceptionally good, and so, in keeping with the rest of the film, the impending clash leaves us little to look forward to. The underdog tale has been redrafted several times, most imaginatively “Lagaan,” which fashioned a spectacle out of an absurd story; “Chhichhore,” I am afraid, does not follow suit. It uses nostalgia to smoothen out its narrative creases, and while that approach works only intermittently, it throws up several questions, the most important of which is: What in this film is novel? The answer, I suppose, would be: Little. Nostalgia, after all, can only do so much. And with it gone, a blandness begins to infect the narrative. “Chhichhore” hits the few highs we expect it to (thanks to sincere turns from the supporting cast) and the lows, but it falls short in surprising us. It is further weighed down by its constant jumps in time, between the present, where Anirudh and his friends recount the story of the General Championships to Anirudh’s coma-bound son, and the past, where Anirudh and his friends strategise to win. This is crucial in explaining the occasional narrative lumpiness: the present is contrived, the past rather chirpy.
With its ambitions neatly outlined at the start of the second-half, it’s disappointing indeed to see “Chhichhore” retreating to the comfort of predictability. Save for a couple of spirited jokes, most of it is spent sermonising. Where a line ought to have sufficed to establish something, the film employs four, said by different characters in different ways. And just to ram the point home, someone repeats it later again, in the plainest possible terms. But in its final minutes, in spite of determinedly sticking to what appears to be a riskless formula, it does spring a little surprise, one that, when I went back to it later, I would never have guessed was coming. It is not everyday that we see a Hindi film that accepts failure as an important (if not integral) part of growing up, and somehow manages to make it uplifting and wise, but “Chhichhore” does so—quietly, skilfully. Although these concluding minutes are dusted in sugar, there is a bittersweetness to them, a rare sort of bittersweetness. God knows this film could have done with more of it. But at least it's a start.
[Not For Reproduction]
