Masand's Movie Review: What's Your Raashee? epic-size failure
Cast: Priyanka Chopra, Harman Baweja
Director: Ashutosh Gowariker
There is no easy way to say this. Ashutosh Gowariker's What's Your Raashee? is an excruciatingly painful film to watch. For the most part humorless and misguided, the film lumbers along for an unforgivable three-hours-and-thirty minutes, during which even the most patient viewers might contemplate suicide.
Harman Baweja stars as Yogesh Patel, an unmarried Gujarati boy working in Chicago, who is desperately summoned home as the last rescue for his debt-ridden family in Mumbai. He will inherit his grandfather's property on marriage, and hence his folks persuade him to tie the knot immediately so they can pay off their loans. Despite his reluctance, Yogesh succumbs to the emotional blackmail and says yes to be married in ten-odd days, after agreeing to meet a dozen prospective brides, one each from the 12 zodiac signs or raashees.
Using what is unquestionably an interesting plot device, the director casts Priyanka Chopra as each of the dozen girls. Within the film, however, the resemblance between the prospective brides is justified by using a ridiculous explanation offered by Yogesh's grandfather.
The encounters between Yogesh and each of the girls get repetitive soon enough, and the screenplay slips into something of a cyclic mess, with each meeting-scene between boy and girl predictably followed by a song.
It takes extremely skilled writing and superlative acting to create 12 distinct characters using the same actor; and while Priyanka Chopra throws herself into the challenge, she is let down by a poor script. Apart from a few characters that stand out because they're sharply written and convincingly performed, most of the girls appear as clones of each other because the only thing separating them is a single quirk and their costume.
So you have a gawky small-town college girl, a sexy microbiologist from Kampala, a die-hard romantic raised on the movies, an honest middle-class girl hoping to rebuild her life after a break-up, a dominating businesswoman looking for a contract marriage, a kooky damsel who's convinced she knows Yogesh from a previous birth - and at this point, you still have six girls left to go…
As if this story wasn't tiring enough already, Gowariker squeezes in two pointless sub-plots - one about Yogesh's philandering uncle and a detective hired to track his movements; the other about a loan-shark's henchmen stalking Yogesh's brother to return the money he's borrowed from them. The humor in What's Your Raashee is of the broad, juvenile variety, the kind that might amuse six-year-olds.
If you survive the film's plodding pace and make it to the final act, you're expecting to be gratified by a smart ending. After all, which girl does Yogesh Patel eventually choose? Prepare to be disappointed by a cop-out climax that clearly indicates the writers had no idea how to clean up this mess they made.
In sharp contrast to Madhu Rye's novel, Kimball Ravenswood from which it is adapted, What's Your Raashee is a regressive, old-fashioned picture that suffers on account of too many silly jokes, too many unlikable characters, and way too many songs. Even the references to such social evils as child marriage and dowry are fleeting and appear gratuitous.
Despite the earnest efforts of Priyanka Chopra, the actress can't pull off the impossible task of making every single one of these characters a credible, flesh-and-blood person. Truth is, I'm not sure anyone in her place could. Harman Baweja, meanwhile, is endearing in a role that doesn't demand much.
Director Ashutosh Gowariker who's delivered compelling dramas previously, appears out of his depth here tackling urban comedy. Like his epic-sized victories, Lagaan and Jodhaa Akbar and even the well-intended, cult-favourite Swades, Gowariker's What's Your Raashee? is unfortunately an epic-sized failure.
I'm going with one and a half out of five for Ashutosh Gowaiker's What's Your Raashee? Here's hoping his next effort will erase the memory of this film forever.
Rating: 1.5 / 5 (Average)
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