Ramprasad ki Tehrvi

DIRECTED BY-: 

Seema Bhargava

STARRING-: 

Manoj Pahwa 

Deepika Amin

Ninad Kamat

YEAR OF RELEASE-: 

2019

PREMISE-:

Bauji's entire family comes under one roof for 13 days after he passes away. We get a glimpse of their dynamics, politics and insecurities as each one of them is on their journey to discover their own selves and truth.

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

THE POSITIVES-:

• The film was at its best when it indulged in humor.

• The performances by everyone in the cast were excellent.

• Some of the dialogues and scenes were hilarious and felt very realistic.  

• The competent direction and cinematography inside the house provided the film authenticity in terms of ambience and appearance. 

• The ending of the film was sweet and thematically very satisfying.

THE PROBLEMS-:

• Some song choices felt unnecessary and spoiled the film’s pacing.

• The film did a below average job of balancing the tragic and humorous tones. Whenever it tried to explore the former, it often came across as saccharine and sappy. This frequently broke my immersion in the film as the creativity of the comedic scenes was constantly undermined and overshadowed by the generic, sorrowful melodrama - filled with monochrome flashbacks and wistful, dispirited music. My frustration was also due to the fact that there were very clear ‘’cues’’ and ‘’sections’’ of scenes designated to humor and sadness separately, rather than blending the two in an entertaining way. Instead of depicting humor in sadness and sadness in humor, the screenplay often curtailed the intermixing of the two emotions and erected a rigid boundary in between, which was hardly ever broken. 

• Seema’s storyline and her marital drama with Nishant felt very forced, cliched, and inconsequential to the overall plot. The haphazard way in which this storyline was resolved (She apparently learns her ‘’lesson’’ by accidentally eavesdropping on a preachy conversation) further made the script look very weak.

• The drama inside the house felt very formulaic. Scenes would begin with a member complaining about the injustices he/she has faced in their life, and would end with the other members of the household either giving their consolation and sympathy, taunting them, OR going on to rant about their own personal problems. This gimmick worked really well in a couple of scenes, but after a while it felt very overdone and repetitive and it seemed like this was the only ‘quirky’ or compelling element the director had up her sleeve. This also resulted in almost all the characters appearing to be very thin and more or less the same, eventually blurring together with no uniqueness or specific traits differentiating them from each other. The four central brothers initially seemed to possess some potential in terms of character development, but they unfortunately also quickly resorted back to the overused template of complaining, taunting and consoling. The only character who felt somewhat different from the rest of the family was ‘Rahul’, a hormonal youngster, who, although I won’t say was my ‘’favorite’’,  still proved to be a character that I could distinctively remember and properly describe after the film had ended. The most memorable character in the film being a teenager with less than 15 minutes of screen time marks a clear attestation of the script severely floundering in the characterization department.

RATING -: 5/10