CHALO DILLI REVIEW
Star cast: Lara Dutta, Vinay Pathak, Akshay Kumar (special appearance), Yana Gupta (special appearance).
Director: Shashant Shah
Chalo Dilli is a modification of John Hughes’ 1987 comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles, in which Steve Martin and John Candy played mismatched strangers who take a life-altering trip together, it also include some part of Bheja Fry & Jab we Met Instead of New York to Chicago, the journey is made from Mumbai to Delhi via Rajasthan.
Lara Dutta plays Mihika Banerjee, an uptight investment banker who is the senior VP of a 200-crore company, who’s a corporate honcho and a sophisticate – the kind who hops country to country in high heels and finishes pending work on flights. This is the type of woman who never cracks a smile, who after five years after marriage doesn’t have a child because she doesn’t want the responsibility and who is willing to travel on her own birthday because she doesn’t care about spending it with her husband. In other words, a woman in urgent need of a life-lesson on getting her priorities right. The perfect man to deliver this is the zarda-chewing Manu Gupta, played by Vinay Pathak, Manu Gupta (Vinay) is the obnoxious antithesis to Mihika with a profession selling saris and “ladies dress materials” at Karol Baugh. Who is loud, talkative and relentlessly crass. But unlike Mihika, Manu has his heart in the right place and over the course of a long, unexpected journey, he teaches her what’s important.
Story of the movie stands on a flight from Mumbai to Delhi that she misses despite paying a deaf ear to the passengers standing in queue and waiting, and builds on her road trip to Delhi with an unwanted co-passenger Manu. Manu, whose mannerisms and etiquettes are way below Mihika’s pride and dignity, ultimately finds a highly respectable place in her heart. Simplicity beats sophistication, as always.
The film has the two addressing each other as bhaisahab and behenji. But their relationship graph is most interesting to watch—changing dynamics at each turn.
There is nothing great that the movie has room and balcony for, apart from wit coupled with a feel-good factor. Lara Dutta is the woman to be credited mostly for making ‘Chalo Dilli’ entertaining. Vinay Pathak is just the extremely talented actor that he is, though a bit repetitive in this film.
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