'Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!' - Movie Review

By Deepa Gahlot

It takes some time to set aside misgivings about a film that seems to say "crime pays." When the eponymous Lucky of Dibakar Banerjee's Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! is first seen, he is a media star and a battery of cops is fetching and carrying for him.

But once you are swept into the flow of the crazily unfolding story, Lucky's 'profession' doesn't matter. In a flashback he is a cheeky teenage Sikh boy (Manjot Singh) in one of Delhi's out-of-a-mould, lower middle class colonies– with untidy houses, wires crisscrossing, all over and Hindi-speaking boys ogling snooty English-speaking girls and beating up a boy from a rival school, just because he is rich.

Lucky starts by stealing greeting cards, and a scooter to take a girl on a jaunt, and by the time he is grown up (Abhay Deol), he pretty much steals everything, using his brains, charm and chutzpah. He has a sidekick called Bangali (Manu Rishi) and a flamboyant fence Gogi (Paresh Rawal), who protects him.

However amoral he may be in other ways Lucky is loyal to Sonal (Neetu Chandra) and is never seen using guns or violence—his only weapons are his quick thinking and glib tongue.

Reminiscent in tone to Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, and closer home to Bunty Aur Babli, the film is marked by Banerjee's eccentric crafting and funky wit (evident in his first film Khosla Ka Ghosla). He also maps a grungy side of Delhi, seldom seen in films—while many directors have gone into the nooks and crannies of Mumbai. The dialect, speech, slang and body language of working class Delhi are so perfectly captured, that you suspect the actors attended workshops before shooting.

Banerjee's whimsical style is demonstrated by his arbitrary assigning of a triple role to Paresh Rawal (excellent), when none of the characters he plays have any connection to each other. The performances by some new actors are also exceptionally good – Richa Chadda who plays Sonal's shrewd sister, Manu Rishi, the young Lucky and Archana Puran Singh as a wily housewife. Abhay Deol, of course, makes a marvellous Lucky with deadpan humour—the actor has consistently shown an adventurous streak in his choice of films.

The director—reportedly inspired by a real life thief—has his sympathies lying with Lucky; even as he steals from Delhi's rich, he is exploited by everyone from a potential business partner (Paresh Rawal) to Sonal's mother (demanding a toaster) to the hypocritical girlfriend, who accepts his money, but won't "touch" it.

The boisterous music (Sneha Khanvalkar) plus retro kitsch look and feel, make it worth a watch. Banerjee is clearly not a one-film wonder, but a director who stands out in a crowd with a style that's quirky and individualistic.

Source: India Syndicate