21 July,2023 10:19 PM IST | Mumbai | Hiren Kotwani
Source/Instagram
There is a scene at the start of Bawaal where Ajay Dixit, aka Ajju (Varun Dhawan), reminisces with his friend Bipin (Prateek Pachauri) about a semi-final cricket match he had played. Bragging about the ambience he had set up - watering the pitch, installing floodlights, getting customised uniforms - he then asks if Bipin remembers how much he scored in the match. While an awed Bipin says it would be about 60 to 70 runs, Ajju reminds him that he got out after five runs. Highlighting the importance of the mahaul that he had created, he points out that it is the atmosphere that people remember, not the result. That could very well sum up National Award-winning director Nitesh Tiwari's latest offering, which began streaming on Amazon Prime Video yesterday.
The film opens with Tiwari creating an awe-inspiring ambience for his protagonist. It turns out Ajju is a high-school history teacher in Lucknow who is obsessed with the image he projects of himself in society. So much so that he marries Nisha (Janhvi Kapoor), as he believes that her business family and educational background would upgrade his social status. While she honestly opens up about her vulnerabilities before the wedding, it creates a mental block for him post-nuptials.
The bawaal in Ajju's life starts when he slaps a student who is the son of a legislator (Mukesh Tiwari). As a result, Ajju is suspended for a month, pending an inquiry. In order to salvage his image, he decides to travel to Europe with his own money to prove that, despite the inquiry, he is a teacher who wants to put his students' future ahead of his own needs. Ajju hopes to conduct live history lessons on World War II from the impacted parts of Europe - Paris, Amsterdam, Normandy, Berlin, and Auschwitz. His ultimate aim is to create the right ambience and hoodwink the students, school administrators, colleagues, and the legislator to drop the investigation, seeing his magnanimity. He also gets his banker-father (Manoj Pahwa) to sponsor the month-long trip, on the pretext of salvaging his marriage with Nisha.
The story by Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari and the screenplay by Tiwari, Piyush Gupta, Nikhil Mehrotra, and Shreyas Jain seem like a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth. The idea to use World War II - which massacred millions, especially in the Nazi concentration camps - as a tool to make Ajju realise his mistakes and mend his ways and relationship with Nisha is a little too far-fetched. Bawaal doesn't seem like the work of the same director who gave us Chhichhore (2019); forget the brilliant Dangal (2016). Though Tiwari moves us with a few scenes and some lines, they are few and far between.
Dhawan plays his part with sincerity, but there's only so much he can do with this narrative. Kapoor emerges as a better performer, though her character is more about boosting the hero's self-esteem. Pahwa plays his character as the concerned father with the required seriousness. The music by Mithoon, Tanishk Bagchi, and Akashdeep Sengupta, is at best average and doesn't evoke any emotion.
While the ending is predictable, it makes you feel that perhaps Tiwari could have told the story better without dressing it up with international locations, lavish production values, and unnecessary mahaul to make this bawaal of a film.
