Chhichhore Movie Review By Movie Insert | Sushant | Shraddha | Nitesh Tiwari | MOVIE INSERT

  What were your college days like? Mine were a blur of bad jokes, glorious friendships,heady romances, illicit pastimes and mostly forgettable lectures despite which, somehowwe all came away with an education. Chichhore gets all this. Director Nitesh Tiwari creates a cocktailof nostalgia, relationships, family drama and on-the-nose messaging that does wobble precariously but eventually it lands. You walk away wanting to be friends with someof these characters – for me it was Varun Sharma’s Sexa, who I think deserves his own spin-off film. In college, Sexa is called Hawas ka papitaand Varun nails this lovely phrase with his deliciously wicked expressions. He delivers one of the film’s best lines– Engineering life mein do cheezein sabse important hain – brain aur Bunty. Bunty of course being your privates. But when we see Sexa as an adult, he’ssitting in London discussing global trends. I want to know how that happened. The one-line pitch for Chhichhore is Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar meets 3 Idiots meets Student of the Year. College friends reunite because one of themis facing a crisis – Anni’s son Raghav is in hospital, fighting for his life. To bolster his spirits, they start to recount their time together when they were engineering students, living in the H4 hostel. The H4 boys were unanimously dubbed 'losers'because the hostel always came last in the GC or General Championship – a college competitionin which 10 hostels competed in 30 sports over 2 months. But these losers decide that they will change the narrative. The screenplay ping-pongs between collegedays and present crisis – the journeys mirror each other, down to the dialogue. So when one character says something in thehospital, the retort comes a scene in the past because the situations are so similar in spirit. The writers Piyush Gupta, Nikhil Mehrotraand Nitesh stitch the screenplay like a tapestry. It’s clever but a little too neat. And it gets predictable very quickly. It doesn’t help that the scenarios in thefilm aren’t new. We’ve seen all of this before – the nerdylosers versus the more entitled and affluent bullies, the good-natured ragging, the canteenromances, the bonding that creates a family. There is little in terms of craft to dazzle you. And the music by Pritam is passable but not sticky. And the film, even when dealing with issueslike ragging or the pressure to achieve, stays in a sanitized space – there is calamitybut no real darkness. Despite these obvious bumps, what keeps Chhichhoreafloat is the sincerity in its messaging, the characters and the performances. We’ve all known guys like this – Acidplayed by Naveen Polishetty, the boy who can’t speak without swearing, Derek played by TahirRaj Bhasin, the jaded senior, Bevda played by Saharsh Kumar, who is basically Devdas without the angst. He’s always drunk. And my favorite Mummy played by Tushar Pandey, who embodies better than anyone else the awkwardness and vulnerability of youth. Sushant Singh Rajput as Anni and ShraddhaKapoor as Maya don’t blend into the surroundings as easily as the others do. He’s too confident and she’s too obviously cosmetic. But they make up for this in their older avatars. Though Shraddha still struggles with an underwrittenrole – Maya seems sour even before they are struck by tragedy. But Sushant blossoms into the father strugglingto make right his relationship with his son. His climatic monologue hits home. The prosthetics aren’t bad but did all ofthem need to have receding hairlines? Has no one heard that 40 is the new 20? These actors and characters hold togetherthe flimsy plot. Nitesh, Nikhil and Piyush also don’t letthe jokes sag. Pay attention to the supporting characters– like the guy in charge of student accommodation and the hostel cook. Each face is a find. The one-liners keep coming so that even whenthe film tests your patience – and let me assure you that it does, the championshipgames are especially over-stretched – you will keep rooting for these people to succeed. Especially for Raghav, played by Mohammad Samad. He looks like a dark-eyed, teenage versionof Jugal Hansraj from Masoom. You know what that means. Basically, he grabs your affection from thefirst scene and doesn’t let go. He’s earnest and heartbreakingly sweet. We want to believe that once upon a time,we were all as unspoiled. Chhichore allows us to revisit that first flush of youth. The film is no match for the inspired grungevibe of 'In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones' or the magic of 'Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar'. But it is a satisfying journey back to those days!