Nothing right about this one

Did Mamata Banerjee secretly back this film? The ‘non-left’ agenda is not just in the title, every character who seeks directions in the film is told “aagey se right”. As if there’s no left road left in the world. And there’s a maa, there’s maati and there’s manush. A whole lot of them, in fact.

When people get down to make their first film after a long wait or a prolonged period of struggle, some of them tend to make the 40-odd films they had been planning in that one movie. Adman Indrajit Nattoji belongs to that bunch.

Aagey Se Right has the seeds of at least three films. One about a cop and his mother and the TV reporter he drools over. One about a police commissioner and his daughter and her boyfriend who can mimic filmi heroes and villains. And the third one about a Pakistani terrorist who comes to India and falls in love with a bar girl. And we are not even getting into the many other sideplots involving an old man frustrated with the municipal corporation and a director making a Bhojpuri Spider-Man.

So what Nattoji (also the writer) does is use a pistol with a Hanuman sticker on it as the Macguffin. It flies in the air from time to time and takes the story, well, aagey se right! It takes two full hours for that pistol to take the trip from the sub-inspector’s holster back to his hand. By then, he has become an inspector and you have become Rip Van Winkle.

Playing with parallel strains of random and uninteresting stories has become the norm in the name of new-age cinema. Everyone wants to make his Pulp Fiction. But where is the style? Where are the morality tales disguised under the dazzle?

If you really have the patience, you may just like the Kay Kay-Vijay Maurya-Shenaz track. Kay Kay starts off as the bearded terrorist who speaks in only chaste Urdu. Till he spots Shenaz dancing at a bar. The beard is shaved off and he starts taking Hindi street lingo classes from his Mumbai associate Raghav Bhai (Maurya).

So you have this macho and scary terrorist experiencing the pangs of love from under his blue burkha (he is hiding, you see) and writing couplets that start with ulfat and end with shanpatti. “Uss item se humko rubaru karna hai,” he quips, providing the couple of only genuine laughs along this tedious trip.

There is nothing else to recommend in the rest of the movie. Shreyas is okay... after all, how long can a man look for his gun? You may mistake Mahie Gill for a lookalike of the actress who played Paro in Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D. She is very average and not all heroines should try dancing around trees. Shenaz is only required to smile and all those who used to watch MTV, know that she can do that in generous doses.

City boy Amartya Rahut’s background score is better than his songs, none of which should disturb your quick nap.

It’s not without reason that all of these films are releasing in a heap. No one’s interested in them and there’s nothing in them to interest anybody.

In fact, watching Mamatadi bellowing against the Left from a traffic-stopper podium is a better idea than going Aagey Se Right.


Pratim D. Gupta, t2