First day first show: 35 per cent
First day second show: 75 per cent
First day third show: 80 per cent
The box-office at the Elgin Road INOX gets busier as the July day progresses into night, and as the cool crowd troops in to catch Nagesh Kukunoor’s Hyderabad Blues 2.
The PLU (people like us) syndrome is developing a FLU (film like us) fetish, with the multiplex movie-goer choosing his space and his time to feast on his kind of flick.
The figures at the City Centre INOX reflect much the same crawl-by-day-run-by-night trend when it comes to a movie “targeted at the multiplex audience”.
Kukunoor’s second peek into the lives of Varun and Ashwini successfully carries forward the story from where it had ended, or rather paused. Successfully, because the film does seem like a continuation of the original movie, with an intermission that lasted six years, not minutes.
The same characters, the same backdrop, the witty one-liners and the same thread of mild satire runs throughout — the “rearranged marriage” has all the ingredients of a hit “sequel”, a concept which hasn’t really worked in India.
“Every film-maker gets tempted to make a sequel of a hit film. But the risks are very high as the second part is always judged by the standard set by the first one. I guess that’s why we haven’t had any true sequel in India, with the suffix 2 in the title,” says Kukunoor.
The storyline, true to Kukunoor’s claims, has been kept simple. We catch the happy couple six years into their marriage. They have everything going for them — he runs a call centre, she is a doctor who is about to open her own clinic, and they have great friends and a cool social life.
The only pester point: to sire or not sire. Varun doesn’t want to become a father — boys will be boys (!) — but Ashwini is determined to have a child (with the backing of every member of their social circuit, of course). In her desperation, she decides to try every trick in the mating game and some, even picking up seduce-your-man tips from Shashi aunty.
In this endeavour, she is aided by her best friend Seema (a brilliant performance by co-producer Elahe Hiptoolah), who runs a marriage bureau, IMF (Instant Marriage Fixation). The entry of Menaka — the original mythological seductress in a cleavage-showing call centre manager avatar — into Varun’s world adds an intriguing twist in the tale.
This film too, like its predecessor, takes a dig at the Indian arranged marriage system and Seema’s IMF mocks the concept from the inside.
Double entendre is a hallmark of the dialogues and just like on the previous trip into the Blues, it works. Of course, the line from the first part (Dil pe mat le yaar…) that became something of a youth anthem, echoes right through the film and is even set to tune for a full-fledged song.
“You must ‘hand’ it to the guy (director-actor Kukunoor),” smiled Ankur, stepping out of an “HB2” night show. The young IT pro and gang found the film “damn cool” as it “speaks our language and addresses our concerns”.
That, after all, is what a multiplex movie is all about — a hilarious “slice of urban middle class life” presented through “everyday situations”, a mirror to the lives and times of a niche audience.
Postscript: The one missing link in the glad-to-be-back Blues brigade is Rajshri Nair, who with her girl-next-door charm had bowled us over as Ashwini. Jyoti Dogra in her “first leading role in a film”, is okay, but, hey, don’t we like our favourite people to be just the way they were when we are on a nostalgia trip?
— Smita Roy Chowdhury
