Cheeni Kum -- Review

Cheeni Kum was a long awaited movie and a bunch of us friends got a chance to watch it last night at the Theaters here.

The premise of the story is around two protagonists ... Buddhadeb Dasgupta (Amitabh Bacchan), owner of a high profile Indian restaurant, Spice6, in London and Nina Verma (Tabu), a Delhi based software engineer visiting her friend Shalini, at London. The movie starts with proud and arrogant Buddha having a tiff with Tabu, who thinks his top class Zafrani Pulao is too sweet for her taste and she comes back with her own authentic Zafrani Pulao. This event bowls Buddha over and an unusual romance builds between them. This provides amusement to the restaurant employees, who get a break from their tough boss and also to Buddha's mom (an amazing Zohra Sehgal) and cute 9-yr old neighbor Sexy (the very cute Swini Khara).

The romance builds around Nina coming back daily to the restaurant to return his umbrella on rainy London evenings. Eventually, Buddha lets go off his guard and falls for this intriguing women. There is a problem however, Buddha is 64 years old and Nina is only 34 years old. The two are convinced they need to get married. Its easy to convince Buddha's mom. But its very hard to convince Nina's dad (Paresh Rawal), who himself is only 58 years old. How the mission is accomplished forms the rest of the plot.

There are a lot of amazing things about this movie. Foremost are the performance of Amitabh and Tabu. They are just natural for this role, as though they were going through it in real life. Amitabh's performance as a snooty, arrogant and proud chef is amazing. He has the best dialogues in the movie ... a non stop stream of one liners ... they are far too many of them, that tickle the funny rib. Tabu at the same time is no-nonsense, refusing to let go of her ideals but at the same time very human.

Sexy is the best supporting role in her cute part giving "romantic" advice of a 9-yr old to Buddha. Her fundas would shock anybody. Zohra Sehgal has an amazing energy going even in this advanced stage of her life, she is 95 yrs old now! She has a very cute dance at the end of the movie.

The rest of the crew plays a very good support cast, especially the chefs who keep making fun of one another, particularly the one with teeth jumping out of his mouth ;-)

The soundtrack is very awesome, especially given that Illaiyaraja has composed the music. He has reused a lot of his past work in Tamil and Kannada movies. Shreya Ghoshal has sung all songs to perfection.

First time director Balakrishnan, who was formerly an Ad Man has done a fantastic job, keeping the movie fast paced with loads of comedy.

On the flip side, the movie loses pace in the second half. It could have used some crisp editing. Paresh Rawal's talents are mostly unused, which is very sad, given his amazing comic abilities. The comedy dries up too, in the second half.

Nevertheless, it is a worthy watch ... maybe worth watching a second time too and owning the DVD for those laughs, isn't a bad idea. :-)