Film Review: ANGREZI MEIN KEHTE HAIN

Genre: Drama
Rating: 3/5
108 minutes
Director : Harish Vyas

      In Any Other Language

Sometime during the latter part of the film, when the middle-aged couple begin to have their irreconcilable differences, the till then subdued wife utters a cliched but telling remark “Our relationship is nominal, our togetherness even more so”.
Set in Varanasi — the rustic locales at times reminding you of ‘Mukti Bhawan’ (2016) — AMKH is a tale of three couples going through diverse phases in their lives: mundane, merry and melancholic.  Yashwant Batra (Sanjay Misra), a postal employee, leads a banal existence with better-half Kiran (Ekavali Khanna) and adolescent daughter Preeti (Shivani Raghuvanshi).
Yashvant brings home the dough, besides his regular ‘quarter’, to which dutiful housewife Kiran is trained to add ice and water. Their relationship is equally frosty — till one fine day newly-wedded Preeti delivers a sermon on love, caring and relationships. But is it too late?
Director and co-writer Harish Vyas, in his first Hindi feature film, has chosen a subject close to the heart of the average middle-class Indian. Sanjay Misra is delectable as the pot-bellied, unkempt husband who thinks that by bringing in the moolah, the wife has no cause for complaint, or that sitting too close on a two-wheeler would be fodder for neighbours’ gossip.
Preeti, who secretly marries next door lad Jugunu (Anshuman Jha), is perfect as the rebellious barely-out-of-her-teens daughter leading a married life unlike her parents’. But it is the husband of the third couple, who engages your attention and alters Yashwant’s outlook towards married life. The latter sees the proverbial faint light at the end of the tunnel thanks to Feroz’s (Pankaj Tripathi in a typically underplayed role) stoicism, despite tending to an ailing wife.
The first half is brilliantly played out, and I thought Misra outdid himself. The director seems to lose plot in the second half: the script slackens just that little bit. However, Vyas manages to extract stellar performances from the entire cast.
Complementing veterans Misra and Tripathi is Faroukh Mistry’s (son of legendary cameraman Fali Mistry) breathtaking cinematography which takes in the sights and colours of Varanasi and succeeds in keeping the viewer’s attention riveted on screen.