Dil Kabaddi movie rating and review

Dil Kabaddi (2008) movie wallpapers :

 

 

 

Dil Kabaddi (2008) Movie Rating and Review :

Rating :

Acting – 6/10
Direction – 2/10
Screenplay – 0.5/10
Music – 2/10
Technique – 3/10

Review :

A wooden woody

Bollywood is supposedly coming clean. There’s so much of hullabaloo over a song being originally composed by someone and being arranged by someone else. There are producers paying up to Rs 8 crore for plagiarising a musical loop!

Then how come a movie like Dil Kabaddi is legal? Because to call it just a copy is saying nothing. The film is a frame-by-frame, action-by-action, dialogue-by-dialogue, gesture-by-gesture replica of Woody Allen’s 1992 film Husbands and Wives. From a kiss lit up by a lightning strike on the 21st birthday party to a car ramming into cars in front and behind at the parking space, every detail is ditto!

So what’s the big deal? Aren’t all the Vikram Bhatt and Sanjay Gupta movies copy-paste jobs as well? Yes, they are — but they do not feature Irrfan Khan, Rahul Bose and Konkona Sensharma. They do not pretend to be avant garde cinema, to push Bollywood to the edge, to tackle the modern-day trials and tribulations of married life in a metro.

Because Dil Kabaddi honestly does nothing. Made seven years before American Beauty, Allen’s Husbands and Wives was a brilliant cinematic pastiche of how husbands, especially husbands, and wives, behave oddly with each other as they hit mid-life. Of how younger women become the object of the husbands’ fantasies, leading the wives to explore greener pastures too. Here, director Anil Senior(!) casts Konkona and Soha as young wives, clearly choosing to ignore the whole point of the original.

So, what you are left with is a tedious, repetitive, disjointed film often veering into a string of distasteful sex jokes about G-strings and bra sizes. The quasi-documentary style of the characters talking to the camera looks forced and do not bring in the laughs. Woody Allen humour, well, it’s something else.

Also, the way Woody shot his film — very much like a home video, with almost every scene canned in a single shot with a roving hand-held camera — gave Husbands and Wives its intimate quality. Here, you do not feel for any of the characters, let alone try and understand who is flipping for whom and why.

That brings us to the cast of the movie, the sole reason why you must have had thoughts of catching a show of Dil Kabaddi. Well, Irrfan, again, is a delight. Perhaps the only thing original about the movie, he gives a fresh twist to the character played by Sydney Pollack. Steering clear from his Metro character Monty, Irrfan is the man behind the film’s few fun moments. You just can’t imagine anyone else mouthing: “I love you from my guts!”

The same cannot be said about Soha. In the role of Irrfan’s cranky and confused wife, a character nailed by Judy Davis in an Oscar-nominated performance, Soha sucks out all the humour from the lines, making it strictly one-dimensional. Classic lines like “Don’t defend your sex” are simply lost in her translation.

Rahul and Konkona, as the other couple trying to hold on to a disintegrating marriage, are their natural selves. But their exchanges obviously lack the sting the original husband and wife had. When Mia Farrow asked Woody: “Do you hide things from me?” you were aware that the two had split in real life after the movie following a 12-year-old relationship because of the actor-director’s secret relationship with her adopted daughter. Here “Tum mujhse kuch chhupate ho?” does not resonate.

Rahul Khanna and Payal Rohatgi have little to do and the less said about the little they do is better. Debutante Saba Azad, though, is quite refreshing.

Dil Kabaddi is meant for an audience, which has access to a Husbands and Wives DVD, and there’s no reason why you should head to the movie theatre and not the video parlour. If you are looking for something desi, get Mixed Doubles. It’s funnier and, more importantly, it’s original.

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