Aiyyaa Movie Review

Read the Exclusive Aiyyaa Movie Review

Girl dances to songs of Madhuri, Sridevi and Juhi wearing outsize glasses. A huge garbage bin in front of a house. A father fiddles with 30 old phones and smokes 3 cigarettes at a time. A blind grandmother with long open hair careens about on a motorized wheelchair screeching songs and slogans. A dog-mad brother makes out with a girl in a Playboy bunny costume in a bathtub. A colleague dresses like Lady gaga and dances in the college on a table. Does all this make sense to you? No? Aga bai! did not make sense to me too!

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Star-Cast: Rani Mukerji, Prithviraj Sukumaran

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Director: Sachin Kundalkar

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Producer: Anurag Kashyap, Guneet Monga

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Duration: 2 hrs 29 mins

Aiyya is a fragmented, disjointed, confused and frenzied mirror that Rani holds up to herself. There are so many things in it and so much that it tries to be that it ends up showing us only pieces of what could have been a sweet love story or a mad comic caper or an auto erotic lunatic’s story. The movie careens from shot to shot, suddenly showing us a song, then cutting to a dialogue to abruptly becoming funny. It is too wakda for its own good.

Rani plays a dreamy girl looking for real love. Instead of love, lust strikes when she smells (yes, you read right) a Tamilian guy in the Art college where she works. She starts following him in a daze every time she smells him and falls in love with him. In the meantime, her crackpot family fixes her marriage with a decent Maharashtrian bloke. What does she do next? Aiyya takes you through a maze of dance styles, bizarre scenes and wacko characters before it reaches a surprisingly sweet end.

Rani goes all out to please the audience. She does a ‘lavani’, a belly dance, a Silk Smitha type number and a bit of Bharat Natyam and puts her heart into each of these songs. However, the story and Director let her down. Her acting swings from exaggerated comedy to serious dialogues and leaves you confused about the character. Why a fine actress like her should want to try and impress the audience with a road show of her talents is beyond imagination.

Prithviraj making his debut in Hindi movies cuts a fine figure. He is pure eye candy in this film. Ishha!

The person who was the best fun to watch because of the bizarreness of her character is Anita Date as the Lady Gaga colleague. She is fun and uninhibited and seems to be the only one who fits the movie. Though of course we cannot ask questions like “Who lets a lunatic like that work in a college? and why did she need horrendous buck teeth given that her character was anyway so OTT?” It is only one of the zillion questions that strike you but you dare not ask for answers for fear of what you will face when you look into the Director’s mind.

I like the fact that the movie shows its ok for women to lust and be open about it. And there are a few good scenes and a few laughs. But sadly it’s not enough to compensate for the uncontrolled madness exhibited over a film of 2.5 hours. You have to be truly in a ‘wakda’ state of mind to enjoy the high camp style of this movie. If you look at it as a surreal sort of movie it is enjoyable but otherwise it will leave you dizzier than the “phugadi” that the Maharashtrian women are seen doing in the movie. Mala jau de.

Verdict: A simple story turned on its head by some crazy direction. One time watch for the groovy Prtihvi and Anita Date
Ratings: 2.5/5