Review: A grey comedy

You can find almost every kind of deviant associated with Mumbai in Pankaj Advani’s debut film. There’s Guru, a car thief (Kay Kay), Mona the con woman (Rimmi), gangster Faujdaar (Anupam Kher), his henchmen, a film producer, a builder, a mechanic, a prostitute, a god man, a fading actor,  a taxi driver and a hit man.

Things go awry when Guru picks the wrong Mercedes to steal. Ganpat (Dilip Prabhavalkar), his partner and the automobile makeover artist, changes the Merc’s identity. They think they’ve hit the jackpot when they find Rs1 crore in the boot but a gross error comes to light when Guru tries to sell the car to a contract killer, who Supari recognises that the car belongs to.

A series of events, including Ganpat losing his memory and forgetting where he has hidden the loot, leads to Guru having to come up with a quick scheme to pay Faujdaar the money or pay with his life. Enter small time con artist Mona. From here on, people keep conning each other, exchanging bags,  and losing the money along the way.

A grey comedy, there are no overt laughs. Kay Kay and Kher hold the show together while the ‘she’s a bad girl’ track and Rimmi’s mix of Bengali and Hindi dialogues add to the annoyance of her performance. A couple of sequences are noteworthy like the garbage dump scene and Kay Kay’s introduction scene.

A smart screenplay helps bind the pieces but the journey is too chaotic.