Nanu ki Jaanu Hindi Movie

Feature Film | 2018 | UA
Critics:
Is it a comedy? Is it horror? Is it social drama? Is it funny? Is it a weird love story? No one quite knows and when everything is piled on so thick, you begin to wonder as audience if you have lost your capacity to care. The background music is ideal for saturday morning cartoons and is so loud you want to order ear plugs. At 132.47 minutes, you idly wonder if they would be easily delivered before you would turn permanently deaf.
Apr 19, 2018 By Manisha Lakhe


When Nanu and his gang (Manu Rishi and two others) kick open doors and make people sign away their apartments or else. The 'Or else' is a girl who looks supremely disinterested, who tears her sleeve and threatens to complain of assault. The old man signs the papers. This is meant to be dark comedy. You're like, how is this comedic? Khosla Ka Ghosla was dark. This had better go somewhere. It just goes to an item song happening at a wedding. Do they get the wedding party to sign papers also? No. Just an item song.


Suddenly it is dark and they get into a disco, where Nanu (Abhay Deol) picks up a girl and makes out with her in the car (they couldn't go back to that apartment they appropriated?). And when morning comes, he drives and witnesses and accident. He picks up the girl (totally out of character for a thug, but he has a golden heart I suppose) who smiles so much, you feel a horror film come on.


The girl becomes a bhootni (blue paint on her body, tattered dress, and an ability to live in the chimney) and haunts Nanu, preventing him from drinking beer and even cleaning up his messy house. Before you can say, 'Why is she moralistic and judgemental?' or 'She cleans home? Then let her haunt mine!'


Nanu lives in a building where there's a lad who extorts money, has a security guard who drinks and sleeps on the job, neighbor who beats his wife, weird neighbors (Brijendra Kala and his wife) who have a mentally disabled daughter called Phantom who plays with a red ball in the open landing space on the 5th floor. Why is she called Phantom? Does she not exist? But the story gets into the funny haunting which involves Manu Rishi stripping to his boxers and then being hung upside down mid air. The comic background score tells us that we are supposed to laugh. But we're wondering why daddy of bhootni (Rajesh Sharma) is simultaneously being haunted whenever he tries to smoke. It's hilarious to see the Censor Board warning 'Smoking Kills' appear on screen when the man is being haunted by his dead daughter who did not smoke.


Moral science lessons don't stop: Wear helmets, Don't answer phones when you're driving, Muslim people are living in terror in India because they may buy goat meat and the mob might lynch him, you should not steal , do not give in to fake people who pretend they can become ghostbusters, men who give moral science lessons are having affairs with young nubile women, wife beating is bad, especially with a moralistic ghost haunting the apartment building.


The film has been made shoddily and no one cares if the dead girl (Patralekha) turns Nanu into a dithering, emotional mess, or turns his goon into a crazy person. How? Why? You don't ask because daddy says the dead girl is in love with Nanu. You shake your head and watch the love song (obviously no one else can see her) and see him wooing a ghost with a cappuccino. When you've facepalmed enough you think, the dead girl comes alive and tells daddy and now boyfriend how there is god, and 'yam-doots' who kill her instead of another chap because his wife was praying really hard at a temple. If you thought the movie is over, Nanu now turns into a professional ghostbuster or maybe not... Let's just dump this film into the vault of ignominy where it belongs after asking this question, 'Why Abhay Deol, why?'

Manisha Lakhe

   

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