When Sameer (Azfar Rehman), surprises his lady love Zoya (Mehwish Hayat) by entering her haveli [manor] under false pretenses, she asks, flabbergasted, how he managed to pull it off. Smugly he answers: “I may be a flirt, and I may be a liar, but I can never be late.”
Confounded, she asks why, and he replies: “Because the train was on time.”
Zoya — her expression aghast by Sameer’s absurdity — walked into this; the audience didn’t.
Technically though, he is right. His train, which got him from Karachi to Punjab was on time. “Main Punjab jaoonga [I will go to Punjab],” Sameer had said earlier in another groan-inducing send-up, one that had lampooned this film’s unjust comparison on social media with Punjab Nahin Jaungi (PNJ).
No, Chhalawa is not a derivative of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaeingay or PNJ — but it does wear the cliché these films spawned with an air of privilege.
Chhalawa is not a derivative film though it wears its cliches with pride. But despite some stellar performances, the rift between its corny jokes and its paper-thin story eventually become its undoing
Chhalawa is chock-a-block with lame jokes — the kind that simultaneously prompt groans and giggles, leaving the viewer half-embarrassed about enjoying the puns in the first place.
This particular self-consciousness doesn’t stay for long. As time passes, the rift between Chhalawa’s story and its comedy spreads, until the two are standing on opposite ends of a divided geography.
Chhalawa’s story is hardly more than flash-fiction (flash fictions, for those who don’t know, are the shortest short stories one can tell). Eventually we get to a point where scenes slog through one corny joke after another, as the story revisits aspects that were made abundantly clear in the first 20 minutes.
As if one needs to get the whole picture, here’s the premise, in a nutshell:
Chhalawa starts with Chaudhry Rafaqat Ali (Mehmood Aslam), a rural landlord who boasts of owning 500 cows, 1,000 goats and just as many acres of land, running desperately to get the blessings of a fake pir (Asad Siddiqui, playing the character Luqman). Rafaqat has put his daughter Zoya under lock-and-key, because she wants to marry Sameer.
Luqman, a young man behind his fake guise, happens to be Sameer’s friend. The two soon enter Rafaqat’s manor with a plan to whisk away the bride before she is married off to her cousin (Mohsin Ejaz) — an explicitly evident villain with an uncultured attitude and a drooping moustache (Adnan Shah Tipu, also sporting the same attitude and physicality, plays Ejaz’s father).
When Sameer and Luqman enter the household, they find Rafaqat’s family to be a hot mess. Zoya, always at odds with her dad, writes letters to her dead mum. Her sister, Haya (Zara Noor Abbas Siddiqui) wants a man in her life — or a career in Lollywood. The young brother, Haroon (Aashir Wajahat), is there for emotional support and a string of comedy sequences.