Jhootha Kahin Ka movie review: Rishi Kapoor is wasted in a flat farce

Jhootha Kahin Ka
Cast: Rishi Kapoor, Sunny Singh, Omkar Kapoor, Jimmy Shergill
Director: Smeep Kang
Rating:1/5

In the 90s, David Dhawan made atrocious comedies about the most inappropriate subjects. For instance, if I remember correctly, Dhawan made three different films about a man having to juggle two wives, with fidelity being the gag — I say three, there may well have been more. Yet even this bawdy premise was rendered mostly innocuous thanks to preposterously un-salacious leading men like Govinda and gifted actors like Anil Kapoor, making the film play out like a tasteless joke. A tasteless but often funny joke.

Watch the trailer for Jhootha Kahin Ka:

Jhootha Kahin Ka, directed by Smeep Kang, is the opposite of those films. True to its title, the film is about several men basing their lives on abject lies, but while the subject matter — a comedy of convoluted errors — isn’t shameful, the treatment and the performances feel somehow dirty. When a man repeatedly snarls at his wife, accusing her of having affairs and declaring that his daughter can’t be his own, it shows a meanness of spirit that does not belong in comedy.

Equally out of place in a comedy are actors like Omkar Kapoor, ostensibly this film’s leading man — a young fellow given to far too much ham (who, ironically enough, was a child actor in some of those David Dhawan comedies). The film is about Kapoor’s character, Varun, lying to a girl, her parents and his father in order to get married under false pretences, while his friend, Karan (Sunny Singh) lies to a girl, her parents and his brother in order to get married under false pretences. The lies double up and while there could have been some hijinks in this situation of crossed-wires, the all-out chaos here involves lesser confusion for the characters than for the writers and, eventually, the few of us viewing this film.

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Rishi Kapoor stars as Varun’s father, a retired policeman who lies about the amount of land he owns, and while the veteran appears to have visibly refused to read the bad-acting memo, he can’t do much with the numbskulls around him. Still, the actor pretends this is a real movie, conjuring up little moments like humming songs from Padosan sternly, as if scolding himself to remember the lyrics, with an eye on the house next door.

There are a few good performers — the always-entertaining Jimmy Sheirgill shows up in an orange kurta-pyjama meant to stand in for a prison jumpsuit, Lilette Dubey stays graceful in a thanklessly written role full of double entendres, and it’s grand to see Rakesh Bedi find some laughs — but the old guard doesn’t have enough room to save this show.

Singh plays Karan relatively straight, in refreshing contrast to Kapoor who rushes through too many expressions, but the boys are given vacuous heroines with no discernible personalities, and the film’s mounting chaos is never sufficiently clever, interesting or even twisted beyond predictability. This is a film in which a girl teaches French using oversized alarm clocks and pineapples, a film where a father sings a peppy song about the looseness of his son’s character, but, most of all, this is a film where nothing seems to matter.

Comedy, as those Dhawan farces underlined, requires consequence — or at least the appearance of consequence. Govinda would bend over backwards desperately spinning a web of convoluted lies because getting caught would ruin everything. These young men, meanwhile, full of a millennial all-will-be-well entitlement, pile on their lies with unthinking nonchalance, never bothered about where the lies will lead or a way out of them. As a result, there is never any tension, there are no stakes, and the only laughs are unscripted.

Call this a comedy? Now there’s a damned lie.

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