The best comedies are the ones based on situations we can imagine happening to us. That’s why my favourites on TV are Seinfeld and Modern Family. While the setting in Nautanki Saala is rather improbable, and the coincidences somewhat contrived, the charm of the film lies in how believable the actors make it appear, how easily we relate to the characters.
It gets off to an admittedly slow start. Ram Parmar, who insists on being called RP (Ayushman Khurrana), sits at a shrink’s office and claims he hasn’t eaten or slept in three months. She asks, knowingly, “Ladki ka naam kya hai?” and tells him she’s been through it too. Our eyes have already begun to roll, when RP tells her a Chinese proverb. And that’s where the laughs begin. Transposed from a Parisian setting to Mumbai, the film – a remake of the French movie Après Vous – is cleverly Indianised. RP plays the character of Raavan in a hit play called Raavanleela, which seems to be designed along the lines of Zangoora, and is also the director.
When he’s heading home to celebrate his girlfriend’s birthday after the 1,500th show of the play, he meets Mandar Lele (Kunaal Roy Kapur) and his life changes forever.
Mandar’s deadpan expression and chronic pessimism are a perfect foil to RP’s vigour and solicitousness. As RP’s girlfriend Chitra (Gaelyn Mendonca) angrily points out, Mandar’s neediness is a form of narcissism, and RP is a pathological do-gooder. While some of the humour in the film is silly, the actors make us overlook that. In one scene, Mandar stares into the camera with his nose dripping – yeah, you don’t want to be eating overpriced multiplex food at that time.
There’s more gross humour in the film than is called for, but what do you expect when Kunaal Roy Kapur is the comic relief? Anyway, there are a couple of lines that are effective only because they’re delivered entirely without irony – such as “Stop playing God, Ram” – and the same goes for in-jokes, such as “Ayushman Bhava”, uttered by Ayushman Khurrana.
The play’s exaggerated use of Sanskritised Hindi is offset by the thick Bihari accent of the producer and the broken Hindi of a Malayali nurse, who prays to a photograph of Mohanlal at her station. But the best aspect of the film is its comic timing, both in terms of dialogue and screenplay. Especially hilarious is RP’s meeting with Mandar’s grandmother. The story itself isn’t particularly original, and the interlaced love triangles have mostly predictable outcomes.
You know there’s only one way a film can turn out when two friends try to sort out each other’s love lives. With the movie driven by the male leads, the female characters are reduced to props. But this doesn’t detract from one’s enjoyment of this wholesome comedy.
The Verdict: Like most rom-coms, Nautanki Saala demands some indulgence, but it pays off.