Ghoomketu Review: Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Anurag Kashyap's Performance Lights up This Earthy Drama...
Starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Ghoomketu is a laugh riot written and directed by Pushpendra Nath Mishra. The film also stars Anurag Kashyap, Raghubir Yadav and Ila Arun in pivotal roles.
Ghoomketu, which is being streamed on Zee5, is named after an aspiring writer from a small town. He has a talent for weaving words into greeting card sentiments and political slogans, so he figures that a literary career cannot be too far away. Ghoomketu is named after its hero, a 31-year-old aspiring writer from small-town UP who wants a career in Bollywood. The film opens with him having run away from home, leaving behind his joint family. In Mumbai, a corrupt policeman is tasked with tracking down this runaway who is trying to convince a producer to buy his terrible scripts.
Misra tries to go for the deliberately whimsical in trying to deal with the film industry but can’t quite pull it off and ends up using tired old tricks of the trade: star cameos, recreating popular film songs and scenes, split screen conversations between characters, simulating old black and white Hindi films for some scenes, using silent films-like inserts for others and caps it all with an inane item song, shot within a bioscope, that talks about speedbreakers and compares a woman’s body parts to a car’s heaving chassis. You can figure the rest.
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Surrounded by innumerable caricatures for characters, Siddiqui is earnest and tries to make the most of being the centre of the film’s universe. However, if there is any life, liveliness and urgency to Ghoomketu, it’s in the triumvirate of Raghuvir Yadav, Swanand Kirkire and Ila Arun, specially Arun who is sense and sensibility, all heart, mind and fun. The loud, angry skirmishes of these siblings could have easily lapsed into a parody but feel real because of the performers’ lived in energy.
Completed in 2014, the film has taken six long years to see the light of the day and the hoariness and disconnect shows. Specially in the figure of Ranveer Singh who now hardly looks the way he used to. Not just the Indian cinema or its stars, but the polity, society, government and we the people have also changed by leaps and bounds since then. Ghoomketu is oddly lost in another time and world.
What's hot
To be fair, there are a few scenes that not only evoke a few chuckles and chortles , but actually have you clutching your sides from laughter. However, this is down to the immeasurable talent of Nawaz and Raghuvir and their inability to make even drab appear funny at times, with neither Pushpendra Nath Misra's screenplay, nor his direction playing any part in it. But, there's only so much that even such wonderful actors can do.
What's not
The film is one, big, unequivocal MESS — no two ways about it! In his quest to the include so many sub-plots and balance a melee of characters, Misra totally loses all sense of script and narration. A major part of the story revolves around Ghoomketu attempting to write a script in every genre possible and failing miserably, and ironically, it's symbolic to how Mishra handles the film.
Plus, there's no sense of time or situation or placement when it comes to the story arc, and editing is as much to blame here as the writing and direction. And guess what, Mishra had his hands on the editing table too along with Kratika Adhikari. Non-linear storytelling is one thing, and incoherent rambling is another thing all together. It doesn't help that the rest of the technicalities and overall feel of production come across as sub-standard. And, unlike Raghuvir and Nawaz, the rest of the cast find it difficult to rise about the shackles of the film they're trapped in.
CAST & CREW
CAST & CREW
- Nawazuddin Siddiqui (Ghoomketu)
- Ragini Khanna (JankiDevi)
- Richa Chadha (Pagaliya)
- Anurag Kashyap (Inspector Badlani)
- Deepika Amin (Mrs. Badlani)
- Raghubir Yadav (Dadda)
- Ila Arun (Santo Bua)
Streaming on Zee 5