Miss Tanakpur Haazir Ho
The genre of satire has always existed in Bollywood. Be it religious satire or political satire, Bollywood has seen almost everything. This week’s release MISS TANAKPUR HAZIR HO is a political satire that reflects the society of today. Will the film reflect success or will it reflect failure at the box-office, let’s analyze.
The film starts off with the summoning of ‘Miss Tanakpur’ by the court. The story then goes into flashback mode and mirrors all the events that led to the summoning of ‘Miss Tanakpur’ by the court. The film is set in the village of Tanakpur, which is ‘headed’ by the ‘Inglish eespeaking Pradhaan’ Sualal Gandas (Annu Kapoor), who is married to a young Maya (Hrishita Bhatt). Pradhaan is unable to keep his ‘wife happy’, which leads her to fall in love with a young and aspiring wannabe’ policeman Arjun (Rahul Bagga). The duo never skips even a single opportunity to meet each other, something that sets Pradhaan’s mind to work overtime with suspicion. Since his repeated confrontations with his wife yield no results, he takes help of the ‘multi-talented’ Goswami (Sanjay Mishra), who ‘engages’ the dead peoples’ spirits for the job of finding out the culprit. And after many attempts, when Pradhaan finds out the culprit to be Arjun, he and his henchmen beat him black and blue and get him tied down semi-naked in front of the whole village. While this leads to Arjun’s sister’s ongoing marriage being called off, simultaneously his father also passes away. Sensing that the villagers may get to know the ‘real reason’ for him to publicly humiliate Arjun, Pradhaan cooks up an impromptu story that the reason why he bashed up Arjun was because Arjun raped his priceless buffalo, which had incidentally been crowned as ‘Miss Tanakpur’ at the village fair. And as a ‘punishment’, Pradhaan and his men order Arjun to get married to ‘Miss Tanakpur’. What happens after that is series of events which takes the film forward. Will Arjun ever break his silence and tell the village the real reason, does he land up marrying ‘Miss Tanakpur’, does Maya ever open up to everyone about her relationship with Arjun in order to save him from the ordeal… is what forms the rest of the film.
As far as the film is concerned, its writer-director Vinod Kapri has tried his best to adapt a real life incident into a film. But what seems to be playing spoilsport in the film is the lack of direction. Because of the lack of strong directorial prowess, the film seems a bit out of place in today’s context. While the first half of the film sets up the mood and the tempo of the film, the second half starts lagging and dragging at many places. The film’s direction also starts going astray at places.
As far as the performances in the film are concerned, the film is steered away by Annu Kapoor, who excels in his role of Sualal Gandas. He really delivers what was expected of him and his role. There are moments when he really wins over the audience with his performance. Onto a close second is the ever reliable and dependable Sanjay Mishra, who comes up with yet another memorable act. While Ravi Kissen is good in parts, Hrishita Bhatt seems to be struggling at places in the film. But she delivers a punch in the scene where she converses with the buffalo. Rahul Bagga does a decent job if not a memorable one. While Om Puri is good in his role, the rest of the characters help the film in moving forward.
While the film’s music (Palash Muchal, Sushmit Sen) is nothing great to write about, it’s the film’s background music (Vinayak Netke) that helps the film sail through. While the film’s cinematography (Yogesh Jani) is good, it is the film’s editing (Deven Murdeshwar) that could have been better.
On the whole, Miss Tanakpur Haazir Ho can be skipped with any regret.
