What The Fish Review

What the Fish Review: Offers mild doses of simple and cheery fun, especially when Kapadia’s around. A worthwhile one-time watch.

Rating: ***

Director: Gurmmeet Singh

Cast: Dimple Kapadia, Manjot Singh, Manu Rishi, Vishal Sharma, Sumit Suri, Anand Tiwari, Deepti Pujari, Geetika Tyagi

First off, that Poster has Got to Go. That is unless Gurmmeet Singh does not mind empty theatre halls. First day first show in Vadodara’s premier multiplex Inox, it got one audience member i.e. me, obviously. Blotchy, tacky and cheesy in design, the film’s poster gives absolutely no incentive to movie-patrons. It fails to mention any of its cast members, of which there are two recognizable faces – the evergreen Dimple Kapadia and lovable pajji Manjot Singh, of ‘Oye Lucky Lucky Oye’ and ‘Fukrey’ fame. I wrongly assumed this film was made by the guy who directed ‘Fukrey’ (Mrigdeep Singh Lamba); ‘Gurmmeet’ Singh turns out to be the man behind the atrocious debacle Warning, which couldn’t last in cinema halls beyond a week. This is how I’d summarized it in my review: ‘Warning wastes its superb 3D effect and mediocre-to-good cast by giving them such a hopeless material to work with. Mr. Gurmeet, please swim away and search for a good story. You’ll find it the day the lost island of Atlantis surfaces. Till then, your movie sucks.’ He brings us What the Fish in the same year, and while the film does look tacky and cheap, its miles better than I expected. But the poster has got to go.

What ‘What the Fish’ throws us is a menagerie of quirky characters doing fluffy, lighthearted comedy in Delhi chit-chat lingo. It’s helmed by Dimple Kapadia, who is delectable in her latest

turn, playing a horribly nagging, impossibly hard-to-please-and-put-up-with Punjabi termagant. For all the critics who call her performance a ‘caricature’, let me tell you that I met a woman a few days ago whose personality was really similar to that of Kapadia’s character. The actress has totally figured out her character’s appearance (the beads, the pursed downturned lips and the staunch suspecting look) and personality (the irritable, energy-sapping pessimism). Her idiosyncrasies include washing and drying currency notes on her bathroom wall to remove any ‘human contamination’, and treating her spotted fish and the money-plant at her home as her children. We learn a few things about her personal life as well: she’s divorced, has one son abroad who is married to a foreigner, much to her dismay. She kvetches and loves putting down others so much, I nicknamed her ‘piranha maasi’.

The film is much more fun when she’s on screen. Unfortunately, the plot requires her character to take leave for much of the movie, and the fun dies down to an extent. The film begins with her character arriving at the Delhi airport and taking the cab to her home. She expects things to be spic-and-span under her niece’s fiancé’s care. Coming home, she smells something weird. To us the house seems perfectly in order, but her alert eyes catch the small details. Her fish has fewer spots. The aquarium appears smaller in size. Her bedroom smells odd. Suddenly, a bedraggled woman in white dashes out of her toilet and flees her house. She suspects it to be a chudail and begins to investigate.

We are taken

thirty days back in time, when she was looking for someone who could take care of her home before her one-month departure to her son abroad. Reluctantly, she hands over her keys to her bhanji’s fiancé Sumit (Sumit Suri), who volunteers. She instructs him to feed the fish the exact proportion of food and refrain from looking at it directly in its eyes, and to sing nursery rhymes to her money plant. She also warns him not to enter her bedroom and private bathroom.

Sumit of course breaks these rules the very first night, hosting a booze party at her home. There he meets friend Neerav (Anand Tiwari) and his wife-to-be Gopa (Deepti Pujari), who need a place to stay temporarily. He enthusiastically asks them to stay at maasi’s home, and in this manner sheds his own workload.

We soon see the home changing hands between increasingly peculiar characters who create a commotion and end up killing maasi’s fish (and a couple of other fishes purchased from the aquarium managed by Pummy, played by Manjot Singh), destroying the money plant and wrecking the entire place.

There is Ravi (Manu Rishi), a tharkibaaz lothario who plans to score it with Neerav’s wife and succeed too, only to repent when Gopa falls in love with him. There’s Meenal (Geetika Tyagi), a character reminiscent of Richa Chaddha’s character in Fukrey albeit without the gunda-giri, and her beefcake brother Rajpal (Vishal Sharma), a boxer in the morning and a cross-dressing mujra dancer by night. The film also includes a Manipuri boxer, two bumbling cops and an assortment of other characters.

What the Fish offers mild doses of simple and cheery fun, especially when Kapadia’s around. The problem with Gurmmeet, also the co-writer of the film, is that while he’s able to make scenes work individually, he’s not able to bring the whole picture together. He also loses out on good opportunities that could’ve added to the confusion, like having maasi call Sumit repeatedly to inquire about the house.

Yet, I really found What the Fish to be refreshing compared to the malodorous trash going by the name of ‘R Rajkumar’ that’s polluting multiplexes. It’s a slightly exhausting but mildly entertaining offering – a worthwhile one-time watch.

ourvadodara.in Rating Guide:

* = Avoid!!

** = Rent It / TV Premiere

*** = Book The Cheapest Seats

**** = Book The Best Seats

***** = Book The Best Seats + Buy The DVD!