Yun Hota Toh Kya Hota

Director: Naseeruddin Shah

Cast: Paresh Rawal, Irrfan, Jimmy Shergill, Konkona Sensharma, Ayesha Takia, Ratna Pathak Shah, Suhasini Mulay, Ankur Khanna, Sameer Sheikh, Imaad Shah, Saroj Khan, Carla Singh, (Boman Irani, Rajat Kapoor)

7.5/10

Consistently outspoken and sometimes uncharitable in his views on Hindi cinema, Naseeruddin Shah needed to create something special on his directorial debut to justify what he had been saying all along. On a personal level, he would have been conscious of the prospect of his detractors sharpening their claws in anticipation of failure. But trust the country’s finest living actor to leave his stamp of originality even while choosing to follow the current Bollywood trend of making films out of multiple stories with a common ending.

Yun Hota To Kya Hota is not only an interesting ensemble piece that marks Shah’s entry into the league of extraordinary actors-turned-directors, but also a tribute to simplicity in filmmaking. Unlike some previous films with multiple plots ? Nagesh Kukunoor’s Teen Deewarein, Mani Ratnam’s Yuva and Khalid Mohamed’s Silsilay, to name a few ? Yun Hota To Kya Hota is not an overwrought attempt to sew up different stories with a common thread.

In Shah’s film, four stories representing diverse ambitions and predicaments are carefully woven into the tapestry, and each develops at a pace all its own before intertwining against the backdrop of a catastrophe.

There is the vivacious Konkona Sensharma, still enjoying the honeymoon phase of her Internet-brokered marriage to NRI Jimmy Shergill, but pensive at the thought of having to stay back in Mumbai with her dysfunctional in-laws till such time she gets her visa. Cut to Irrfan, a cocaine-snorting stockbroker enamoured of an older woman (Suhasini Mulay) who, in turn, brings even younger men into her bedroom. Elsewhere in Mumbai, medical graduate Ankur Khanna has just been offered a seat for an MS course in an American university, but has to bury his ambition because of his bedridden father and lack of finances. Paresh Rawal, a tight-fisted Gujarati organiser of cultural shows abroad, completes the quartet.

All the actors, especially Konkona and Paresh, are wonderfully efficient in the way they make each of these characters believable. But the power of Yun Hota To Kya Hota undoubtedly lies in Shah’s deft handling of subjects as diverse as a daughter-in-law’s trouble with in-laws, the Indian obsession with the American Dream and terrorism. Despite so much being packed in, it never appears to be a sanctimonious ‘message movie’. The symmetry in the way the characters and their stories connect, even if only tangentially, is delightful.

If there is one major drawback, it is the hurried ending. Shah may have been attempting to portray the suddenness with which some lives end and others turn topsy-turvy, but the effect is lost in translation from script to screen.

Ritu Parna Dutta