You would believe that you are hostage on a TV soap set. You are a victim to
a noisy whirlpool with Bharjatiya text, Bhatt content and Priyadarshan
ensemble. A Punjabi marriage – loud boisterous and moving noisily in circles
with food and high energy level individuals screaming their lungs out without
reason. Painfully it is about ‘virginity’ as a primal factor in a relationship.
It is a reminder of the famed (?) statement a heroine made in the 80s that it
was a gift for her hubby on his wedding night!! We’ve societally moved on and
in that context Rabba is a decade too late for the audience to connect to.
Cinema is entertainment? Cinema is social document? This is indulgence without
an iota of sanity. Poorly scripted, badly executed and wearily prolonged. To
begin with the story line is wafer thin and its treatment unfledged.
Saahil (Akash) and his childhood sweet heart Sneha (Tahira) are both set to
marry. The arrangements are on for the grand event and we have an army of
relatives arriving at the wedding house with host Mom (Anuradha Patel) looking
gorgeous but lost in the noisy atmosphere. Uncles and aunts galore: Paresh
Rawal with Sushmita Mukherjee, Raj Babbar with scarfs, Tinu Anand with Hemani
Shivpuri and Shakti Kapoor with weird wig. Everyone is horny in the family
except the groom to be. Big Brother Shravan (Arshad Warsi) has a one point
programme to ensure that Saahil makes it out with women on the way to his
wedding night. He thus tries every trick in the trade to get him hooked on to
some lass before he takes marriage vows.
The film rests entirely on the shoulders of Arshad Warsi and the lead pair.
While Arshad is sufficiently efficient the romantic pair is a yet another
couple rushed into the dream factory. Obviously the product is incomplete and
will take a while. It is really time our debut making dudes realise that the
route to the screen is not the Gym and the damsels that pouting and smiling is
not that a script demands. None of the remaining cast require any mention and
this includes the ever reliable Paresh Rawal.
Formulistic to a fault the script (if there be one!). It is yawnfully
predictable as it unleashes its other shortcomings. Arshad Warsi tries his very
best but is laboured and with lines that include: to cheat is the male hormone;
Cheat on your wife for a happy married life you tend to cringe. His convoluted
take that to correct the shortcoming of Ram even Vishnu had to do a Krishna has
a go at Indian epics and thankfully has not rolled on to being a major
controversy. Here, song and dance are an excuse and with lyrics that state tu
khulla saand ban ja, class is not a preference.
The film maker would also want us to believe that would are idiotically waiting
and willing to jump into bed with men who come with erotic ingenuity in their
psyche (pun unintended).
Even within the limited premise of a comic cap, selling the theory than men by
nature are polygamous and women are willing to get into bed and oblige ogling
men is tad too out of times. Thematically the script is out of sync with the
times. The problem with Amrit Sagar Chopra is that he is trying to sell a
typewriter to Mocrosoft!! Everyone, from the cast to the audience have only one
question: Rabba Mein Kya Karoon!!
L. Ravichander.