There was a moment in Shorgul that rudely woke me from my quiet little beauty sleep that the makers of the film had lulled me into. Someone screamed tumhare ghar mein maa behen nahi hai kya? and I sat up transfixed, startled as I thought I had woken up in the 1980’s.
This was followed by a jealous boyfriend type who shouted tum meri amaanat ho and I was sure I woke up in the 80’s. It would have made sense then. But the sad reality is that it’s 2016, and the makers are stuck in a time warp where a woman is bubble-wrapped as a parcel intended for a man!
Shorgul has been generating a lot of noise with a fatwa having been issued against actor Jimmy Shergill, and a lot of people calling for it to be banned. It is allegedly loosely based on the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. So loosely that directors Jitentra Tiwari and P Singh let the narrative slip by without even attempting to get a hold on it. Stoking the flames of communal tension in the town of Malihabad in the run-up to the elections are two evil politicians, Om (Jimmy Shergil) and Alim Khan (Narendra Jha).
‘But it is wrong to kill each other in the name of religion,’ bellows Chaudhari ji, another political heavyweight (Ashutosh Rana). There is the CM saab called Mithilesh ji, if you may, played by the dapper-looking Sanjay Suri, who just wants law and order to be maintained. In the middle of this ruckus is a young girl, Zainab, and the 2 men besotted with her – her fiancé Saleem (Hiten Tejwani) and her friend Raghu (Anirudh Dave).
The weak plot and its amateurish maneuverings frequently bring us to a state where badly choreographed scenes of mayhem and rioting are met with nothing more than hollow, long-winded speeches about insaaniyat. It gets to us after a while, because the depth that such a subject warrants here is as thin as a Jimmy Shergill mooch! Also, the song interjections do precious little to keep us engaged.
Actors like Ashutosh Rana, Jimmy Shergill, Sanjay Suri, Narendra Jha, Hiten Tejwani and Ejaz Khan do try to put up a brave front, but there is just only so much that one can do with badly written characters. The Turkish actress Suha Gezen has been pitched in unbearably shrill territory. They deserve better. So do we.
I give Shorgul 1.5 Quints out of 5. Empty vessels do make a lot of noise! Phew!
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