Look womb’s talking

Suno Na
Cast: Tara Sharma, Dharmendra Gohil, Rinku Patel
Director: Amy Thanawala
Rating: *

An unmarried pregnant girl is ditched by her boyfriend and rejected by her conservative parents.

Alone and frightened, she plans to commit suicide when she hears a voice - it turns out to be the voice of her unborn child.

Suddenly finding a reason to live, Anu (Tara Sharma) moves from Andhra Pradesh to Mumbai and develops a healthy relationship with her chattering foetus. Anu’s character is a paradox - she’s progressive enough to have premarital sex but continues to wears village-like lungi-type maxis with the entire colour palette of kurtis, even when she lands as a job as a secretary in a Mumbai office.

The womb, now nicknamed Sammy, has verbal diarrhoea talking in a voice that grates beyond belief. Sammy wants an appa and will consider any man Anu encounters, including the musician neighbour called HMV, the Tamil wife-seeking boss, and the meek professor ragged by his female students.

What could have been a cute film, like Look Who’s Talking, turns into a tacky, exasperating ordeal so much so that at one point during the press screening, a fellow journalist shrieked ‘kill the damn thing’.

Besides Sammy, everyone else also talks non-stop except for a couple who fall in love but never interact with each other beyond one scene of her applying antiseptic to his injured face. Love at first wipe! It’s all rather convenient and seeped in small town morality and values of the 1980s where the characters are okay with saying ‘penis’ but cannot say ‘gay’.

Suno Na feels like a Films Division documentary on childbirth, minus the birds and bees lecture and sermons on contraception. The expecting mother groans and rubs her belly so much it is enough to put you off pregnancy