Skip to main content

Mobile Ads

Laal Singh Chaddha trailer review: Aamir Khan's Indian adaptation of Forrest Gump might just work

So the chocolate becomes gol-gappas in Laal Singh Chaddha. In the original Forrest Gump Tom Hanks, who bears a passing resemblance to Aamir Khan, compares life to a box of chocolates: “You never know what you’re going to get.”

Squeezing a gol-gappa into his mouth, Aamir Khan’s Laal Singh Chaddha (LSC) drawls, “Life is like gol gappas. The stomach is filled but you can never have enough of it.”

Well, burp to that. Though I like the chocolate truism better.

From the look of it, LSC is an appetizing excursion into the life of a special child who grows up to become Aamir Khan in Raj Kumar Hirani’s PK: the same stiff walk, the same wide-eyed expression, the same annoying innocence, the insistent tautology. The same devotion to Kareena Kapoor that Aamir lavished on her in Hirani’s 3 Idiots is evident here. Aamir looks really in love, with life and with love.

The long-awaited trailer of Laal Singh Chaddha comes to us with plenty of promises. If it is Aamir Khan it’s got to be special. And the trailer shows that it is special. The ambience is velvety, delicate, and precious especially in the scenes showing little Laal with his feisty mother (if it is Punjabi, can it be any other way) played by Mona Singh who doesn’t allow anyone to support her son although he is polio-stricken.

Cut to Aamir Khan’s voiceover informing us that miracles do happen in real life….in Punjabi. I have a question for Aamir. Is he going to speak in Punjabi all through the film just because he plays a Sardarji? That’s pretty much like watching Nanak Naam Jahaaz Hai, Part 2. But it is also a part of the adaptive scheme. Actor Atul Kulkarni, a long-time associate of Aamir Khan (they worked together in Rang De Basanti) feels the re-telling of the Tom Hanks classic could only work if placed sensibly in an Indian context. So gol-gappas it is.

Aamir, I must admit looks changa (cool) in the trailer. His turbaned avatar is convincing. There is something magical about his vibes with the world around him, whether it is mom Mona Singh (played so memorably in the original by Sally Field) or the woman he loves the incandescent Kareena Kapoor Khan (played in the original by Robin Wright) or Laal’s pal in the army Naga Chaitanya (played with fabulous kinship by Guy Sinise in the original).

Yes, this adaptation seems to work. It is tender and sensible, heartwarming and sincere. I believe Advait Chandan was reluctant to direct this desi take on Forrest Gump. He probably prefers chocolates to gol gappas. But as far as acquired tastes go, Laal Singh Chaddha succeeds in putting a desi tadka into the original Robert Zemeckis film.

The original remains an all-time classic. As per the trailer, the Indian remake seems to get it right. It seems to venture into the world of Salman Khan’s Bharat without stumbling over the perils of excessive jingoism.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

 


by Subhash K Jha
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Watch The Sound with Mark Ronson Apple TV+ explores the curious link between music and technology

In The Salmon of Doubt , Douglas Adams writes: “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary, and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary, and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things.” Cut to the world of music. As much as technology has been a driving force in the industry, the advent of any innovation has often been received with skepticism before it goes on to become the norm. Harnessing that interplay between the creative process of making music and the technological enhancement given to said music, is acclaimed DJ and producer Mark Ronson. In his just-released six-part mini-docuseries Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson , he astutely defines how different the process of creating a great
Post a Comment
Read more

Studying women presidents and prime ministers on screen, from Meryl Streep in Don't Look Up to Dimple Kapadia in A Thursday

In 2016, when I heard Hillary Clinton had lost the US Presidential race to Donald Trump, I took it as a confirmation that this is how much the US hated its women. And I felt temporarily gratified to live in a country which elected a woman as its third prime minister. This was before I remembered Indira Gandhi was the only woman prime minister we have had, and she was an outlier. Her strong and uncompromising leadership style skews meaningful analysis of gender representation in governance. Anyway, for all the breaking of paths and glass ceilings, trailblazers like Gandhi and Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher commonly belong to conservative or traditional parties. Left to the simultaneously imaginative and mimetic art of comedy, the first woman US president looks like Meryl Streep’s Janine Orlean in Don’t Look Up and Julia Louis Dreyfus’ Selina Meyer in the HBO show Veep . They are both are anti-feminists and women of power. Yet they could not be more different in how they reflect the r
Post a Comment
Read more

Netflix's Lupin acknowledges dangers of fantasies of omnipotence, introducing viewers to a socially conscious gentleman thief

By Emma Bielecki Netflix’s immensely successful new French-language show Lupin has introduced a new generation of anglophone viewers to one of the most popular characters in French popular fiction, Arsène Lupin, gentleman thief. Lupin was created in 1905 by the writer Maurice Leblanc at the behest of publisher Pierre Lafitte, who had recently launched a general interest magazine, Je Sais Tout . Lafitte wanted a serial that would guarantee a loyal readership for his magazine, as the Sherlock Holmes stories had for the Strand Magazine. Drawing inspiration from Conan Doyle and EW Hornung’s Raffles stories, Leblanc obliged by creating a flamboyant and ultimately always benign trickster figure. Cat burglar, con artist, master of disguise, Lupin is also a brilliant detective and righter of wrongs. His appeal has proved enduring: in addition to the original 20 volumes of stories authored by Leblanc, there have been countless plays, radio shows, TV series and films, from Italian pornos
Post a Comment
Read more