Movie: Motichoor Chaknachoor
Cast: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Athiya Shetty
Director: Debamitra Biswal
Ratings: 3.5 stars
Motichoor. Whenever we hear the word, the first thing that comes to your mind is the sweet ‘laddoo’. But add ‘chaknachoor’ as a suffix, it automatically demotes to a less popular denotation. The same happens to be the case with ‘Motichoor Chaknachoor’ where high expectations eventually lead to disappointment in the story but you ultimately learn how to settle for whatever is destined for you. How? Let’s find out.
With the set up rooted in North India, the story is about the lives of two people, Pushpinder Tyagi (Nawazuddin Siddique) & Annie (Athiya Shetty). Pushpinder happens to be a Dubai return accountant who has come back to his abode with the expectation and purpose to get hitched, his 4th such prospective conjugal. On the other hand, Annie, who a girl next door believes in pomp, opulence and grandeur, ambitious and dreamy enough to get hitched to a NRI from London, Singapore or any other gorgeous country in the planet. Reason? There’s a huge deal and requirement to make her ‘saheliyan’ jealous about her lifestyle post marriage. Things haven’t been going hunky-dory for her either and all her 10 marriage proposals didn’t work her way. Pushpinder happens to spot her and hit on her from the very first moment he sees her but soon realizes that ‘yaha dal nahi galne wali’ and hence moves forward to try elsewhere and to be honest, anywhere because ‘Shaadi ke liye sirf ladka aur ladki hona zaroori hai aur kucch nahi’. Yes, that’s the height of desperation, hopelessness and wretchedness he had reached just to get married. Or maybe have s*x (based on the suhag raat dream sequence displayed time and again whenever something goes the positive direction)? Annie too sees things failing at her end when it comes to marrying an NRI. Eventually she falls for her Masi’s advice to capture Pushpinder in her love web if at all she has any intentions to settle abroad in Dubai for real to fulfill her dream.
An enthusiastic, high as a kite Pushpinder falls prey to Annie’s love web and ends up thinking that Annie makes him cut off his previous engagement and stuff because she’s ‘in love’ with him for real. Eventually Pushpinder realizes that everything from Annie’s end is anything but love and her only initial purpose to get hitched to a 36 year old Pushpinder was the fact that she could settle in ‘Dubai’ and have a rocking lifestyle abroad and fulfill her lifelong dream. This however got shattered when she came to know that Pushpinder returned to India jobless and he earned a new job in Uttar Pradesh itself. This shook Annie up as an earthquake and she realized that her apparent ‘compromise’ in marriage failed as she can’t settle outside India.
As Pushpinder gets to know the reality of her and his own mother who too wanted to drive him out of India for her situational greed, a hurt and mutilated Pushpinder decides to go back to U.A.E (Doesn’t go in reality though as he comes back few days later from the airport). But those days were good enough for Annie to realize how wrong and erroneous she had been throughout her life and how life and marriage isn’t just about a lavish foreign settlement but much more than that. Eventually it’s a happy-go-lucky ending for Pushpinder and Annie and they live happily ever after (A typical Bollywood love story ideally blended with sweetness and quirkiness).
IWMBuzz Verdict: Nawazuddin Siddique is simply phenomenal and flabbergasting as usual and the extra (0.5) in the ratings simply need to be accredited because of his staggering performance. I can literally vouch for the fact that no other actor could have been a better casting than Nawazuddin who needed to make the love story of his and Athiya Shetty believable on screen and he manages to do that effortlessly. From playing the serious, bruised son to switching between the pseudo-wannabe romantic husband, she does it all. Athiya Shetty tries her best to play her part but she fails to match up to Nawazuddin’s excellence in terms of performance. Also, her UP accent could have been better as in certain sequences, it looked forceful and fake. Director Debamitra Biswal puts her best foot forward to make a quirky on-screen love story look believable on screen and one can say that till whatever extent it looks believable, it looks so because of Nawazuddin primarily. The opening shot happens to be a drone one where the director tries to give you a sky-view of the entire UP followed by the shots of the Sadhu smoking to get the cultural insights right and the cinematography has complimented the direction well. The dialogues are hilarious to the core but one can arguably say that there were few dialogues which hint a bit towards fat-shaming and sexism. The story goes a little off track and blank in certain areas and it would be wrong to say that you will feel like staying glued to the screen throughout. But the overall narrative unfolds into a good message about the prevalent dowry system in the country which it tries to address through light-hearted humor. The intention is clear but the screenplay isn’t. Athiya Shetty shows promise but fails to convince entirely in front of an effortless Nawazuddin. The background score however was a bit of a disappointment in certain areas as hilarious scenes need to have hilarious background scores to make even more appealing and that’s what kind of lacked. Overall, it’s a competent and admirable effort to get things rolling into the right direction when it comes to taking the society forward to a progressive state and what better than humour to do it? Give it a watch. It deserves 3 stars for the overall packaging but the extra 0.5 simply belongs to Nawazuddin for being absolutely effortless and making acting look like duck soup.
3.5 stars