Movie Review: Gulabo Sitabo (Hindi)

A mildewed, mouldering mansion becomes the backdrop for director Shoojit Sircar's picaresque, unassuming comedy Gulabo Sitabo. Set in the heartland of Lucknow and unfolding as a cat-and-mouse game of squabbles between a cantankerous, greedy septuagenarian landlord (Amitabh Bachchan as Mirza, buried under layers of prosthetics) and his emboldened tenants (led by Ayushmann Khurrana's Baankey) who inhabit the dilapidated "heritage" building, the movie mines this idiosyncratic premise for a laid-back, slice-of-life satire on greed that explores our tendency to covet material things over human connections, juxtaposing our penchant for commodifying history for sky-high prices against the lives of cash-strapped people who live from meal to meal and are desperate for a light at the end of the tunnel, hoping for a relief them from their hardscrabble lives.

As much as the warring between the two principal characters — the grumpy old "supposed" owner and the intransigent tenant who're constantly at loggerheads but are united by their selfish love for the mansion — forms the spine of the story, it's the details that help define the contours of the unshowy drama. But, despite cinematographer Avik Mukhopadhyay's lovingly captured frames which lends the film a lived-in vibe that feels entirely authentic, some of it is a missed opportunity, what with a story that keeps going round in circles with little dramatic payoff (at least until the very end) and the key characterisations coming off as bland and laboured. Only Fatima Begum (Mirza's wife, played by a fantastic Farrukh Jafar) seems to be having all the fun, and boy she does!