It’s a role reversal for siblings Chandan (Sumeet Vyas), Chanchal (Maanvi Gagroo) and Chitvan (Amol Parashar) when parents Charu (Shernaz Patel) and Chinmay Sharma (Kumud Mishra) decide to separate.
Setting aside their own lives, the siblings gather at the parental home in a panic.
Sumeet Vyas’ screenplay, story and dialogues which also credit Abbas Dalal (for screenplay) and Arunabh Kumar (for story), rests on a muslin-thin plot.
Mom wants to go to Auroville and dad wants to go biking with a gang. So after 36 years of togetherness, why can’t they go their separate ways?
For the siblings, it’s unthinkable. Parents are everybody’s backup insurance. How can they break up and give up the family home?
When hints dropped at the breakfast table don’t work on the parents, the three siblings decide on one final trek for the family.
A therapist to sort out Charu and Chinmay, Chandan’s ex-wife turning up and Chitvan’s impossible custody battle for his girlfriend’s child, are brought in to beef up the main story.
Since there’s really so little to say, there are background songs all over, the lyrics blandly summing up every episode. The house has been sold. ‘Lag gaya…BC…’ plays. Nostalgia drips about the ‘deewaren’ of the parental ghar. There’s another that says, ‘Raita fail gayi’ as the story builds up. Chitvan’s child custody loss gets a ‘Patang jaise kho gaya’. There’s a ‘Motherf…’ song at a party and ‘Besabar’ mourning as the parents kiss on the dance floor.
Director Neeraj Udhwani spreads the slim plot over only five episodes but there’s still so much padding that scenes like a sword duel between Chanchal’s husband Pranav (Kunaal Roy Kapur) and his cousin are entirely ‘cuttable’. Trying hard to give flesh to the characters, Pranav is built up as past royalty with ancestral property of palaces and businesses, ‘Bhabhisa’, ‘Hukum’, ‘Veergati’ and ‘Kamagni’ sprinkled all over him while you also hear the ‘BSDK’ word. Weak attempts at humour, an asthma pump in the middle of the duel, a dump in the jungle because of messed up bowel movement and wet leaves to be used as wipes, don’t evoke even a passing smile.
But what really works is Kumud Mishra’s outburst at the end as he demands that the children respect his and Charu’s decision. When parents are expected to unquestioningly understand their kids, who gave the children the right to put their parents in the dock and question them?
In the role reversal, it’s the children who have to finally let their parents fly, live their lives the way they want to. Sweet. If only the telling had been creatively tripled too.
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