Aiyyaa is like a guy who is walking on a rope. If it falls to the left then it would belong to the bad movies category. If it falls to the right then it would belong to one of those movies which are worth your time. Unfortunately Aiyyaa barely holds on in-between these two extremes. The problem with the movie is that it’s got too much of a quirk factor. There. I said it.

The story follows a dreamy stuck-in-an-extremely-vivid-fantasy-trip Meenakshi played by Rani Mukherjee who in order to escape the weird clutches of her eccentric Deshpande family zones off into her own world where she imagines that she is a part of one of those old Bollywood item numbers. When she is not dreaming she is a young(“not so young”, you say to yourself ) Maharashtrian  girl-next-door whose family finds her Madhav (played by Subodh Bhave) the perfect guy to marry  but she longs for the not-so-boring life that most girls who take Bollywood seriously aspire to have. She doesn’t approve of her groom. How can she do that when she can’t stop lusting after Suresh Iyer (Prithviraj) a south-Indian student of Arts in the college where Meenakshi is a librarian? But you see, things are not so simple. Not when Meenakshi has a heightened sense of smell a la Perfume which she uses to track down the poor hapless, expressionless Suresh. Why she does that instead of using her “gift” to solve crimes is probably not so surprising. Too much Bollywood?  Who knows? Now what happens after that? Who does she choose in the end? What happened to her dreams and passions? Will she settle for a normal life with a seemingly normal husband or do something to make her dreams come true?  Yawn.

You see, it just DOES NOT hold your attention. Right when you think the story is getting interesting the director  was probably zoning off during the making of the movie into his own dream world while the audience is stuck with an absolute nightmare which stretches on and on and on and on so much that you think it’s never going to end. But end it will. And with a huge twist which will knock your socks off. Something even better than the one in Sixth sense. Not really.  This movie is way too bland to even have a twist.

The side characters are what I was talking about mainly when I mentioned the quirk factor. There is Meenakshi’s father who smokes three ciggies together, a wheel chair-ridden granny with golden teeth (yes. You heard that right.), a dog loving brother who sleeps in a bath tub and her colleague in the library Maina who happens to be a lady gaga lookalike and never misses an opportunity to make sure you got that fact imprinted in your head by spoofing her in ridiculous ways and dressing up in S&M gear. Of course these could have been turned into a charming assortment of quirky characters that you want to know more about but alas it doesn’t happen at the shaky hands of the director Sachin Kundalkar who already had three hit Marathi movies to his name.  Continuity errors seem to be the latest trend in Bollywood as well as the overuse of the already overused clichés and Aiyyaa is a treasure trove of the above two things. Just because Meenakshi is a Maharastrian who comes to live in Pune doesn’t mean she had to pronounce every fellow as Phellow and freedom as Phreedom. What are you trying to do, movie? You think I’m stupid, don’t you?

It begins with all the noise of a Transformers movie for the first 30 minutes which manages to numb your senses enough for you to just accept your fate and get on with the movie. And then to add more fuel to the smoldering fire that is developing in the form of a headache inside your head it becomes boring. Halfway through you just don’t care and you are happy to be alive and you begin to smell roses. By the end it teases you, making you think at the back of your mind that something interesting is going to happen but lets you down miserably. Almost every character is a loud caricature except for Rani’s and her Fiancé’s who surprisingly is well developed.  But the movie is absurd, loud, senseless, hopeless, stingy, sadistic (two and a half hours?) and I’m only going to stop this sentence because I am running out of appropriate adjectives. If you like escapist fare which escapes from your mind as soon as you watch it, then go for it. Or if you would rather watch a movie, stay the hell away from this overcooked soup of melodrama.

Article Posted By : prajwal316  On November 13, 2012lView All Articles

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http://www.veethi.com/articles/aiyyaa---the-movie-review-article-1190.htm

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bollywood , rani mukherjee ,