Released without a whimper of fanfare or publicity, “Ferrari Ki Sawaari, the tastefully delicate new film produced by Vidhu Vinod Chopra and released by Tehelka, is a subtle tehelka by itself.
We open with Rusy (Sharman Joshi) a wide-eyed, meek widower, hidden behind big outmoded spectacles and a fixed unsure smile. He has a clerks’ job with a matching salary and a 12-year-old son Kayo (a winning Ritwik Sahore), with a natural bent that could make him the next Sachin Tendulkar. When Kayo is spotted as a sure-fire finalist to be tutored in a training camp at cricket’s Mecca Lords, Rusy is confronted with the under privilege’s worst nightmare: getting the money to send his son aboard.
The sum, a hundred and fifty thousand, may sound meager, but its significance is played up in one of the film’s early scenes when Rusy nips safe-kept money out of his small apartment’s nooks (middle class people, will know what I am talking about), to buy his son a cricket bat. When he takes his small porcelain piggy bank into the bathroom, and hits the flushes’ chain to mask the shatter of its sound from his grumpy sofa-stricken father Mota Papa (Boman Irani), we cannot help but be affected by its real life candor.
A little later, he meets a local wedding planner (Seema Pahawa), who desperately needs a red-hot “Ferrari” for a local thug-turned-politician’s nincompoop son’s wedding. The only model matching the poster she carries is owned by Sachin Tendulkar. And so in one of cinemas most naturally-drafted turn of events, we find Rusy making off with Sachin’s wheels to give the spoiled brat a “Ferrari ki Sawaari” on his wedding day.
Ferarri’s screenplay, written by Vidhu Vinod Chopra and debuting director Rajesh Mapuskar, is bead-trimmed with small, untarnished, gems for scenes and unpretentious, naturally sewn dialogues by Raj Kumar Hirani (Mapsukar was his assistant in Lage Raho Munna Bhai and 3 Idiots).
Mapsukar films “Ferrari” with self-effacing minimalism; His framing arsenal rarely exceeds small master frames, faint close pushes and reverse angles and that suits the plot’s temporal feel and rhythm just fine. Needless cinematic trickery would only smudge the film’s excellently laid-out coat anyway.
Somehow even the songs by Pritam slide right in without jolting the narrative and one of them features Divya Balan in an item number, although I doubt her cameo would raise ticket sales.
There’s a stinging tinge of reality in Ferarri’s down-to-earth conception, making it hard to pinpoint the movie’s actual genre; but for the most part it doesn’t need one (the movie is inaccurately marketed as a comedy). Well yes, it is a dramedy, but then again it’s so much more. Even though the movie never announces that it is “art” or “reality inspired” cinema, it is certainly artistically real.
The movie debuted at its press-premiere last night with negligible publicity and media turnout. Mismanagement or whatever reason that distributors know better only harms Ferrari’s local box office potential. Now, if this were an Amir Khan movie (and let me tell you, Sharman Joshi suits the picture just fine), we wouldn’t hear the end of it!
