Director: Vikas Bahl
Producer: Anurag Kashyap, Vikramaditya Motwane, Karan Johar, Madhu Mantena
Writer: Anvita Dutt Guptan (Screenplay & Dialogue)
Story writer: Vikas Bahl, Chaitally Parmar
Starring: Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt
Music director: Amit Trivedi
Cinematography: Anil Mehta
Editor: Sunil Nayak
Production company: Phantom Films, Dharma Productions
Distributor: Fox Star Studios
Release date: 22 October 2015
Running time: 167 minutes
Story Line: A big fat ”Shaandaar” Indian wedding, which is actually a business merger between two of the biggest business families of India, is happening at an exotic castle in Europe. Mrs. Kamla Arora, the grandmother of the Arora family, the sole owner of the billion-dollar business and the property, has planned their wedding. Kamla Arora is a bitch, treats everyone like her servants including her three sons, Bipin (the eldest), Vipul and Vinay. Mr.Fandwani, the groom’s father is a loud Sindhi businessman who is the counter to Kamla Arora: The Fandwanis dress in gold, accessories in gold and if possible they drink and eat gold.
Based against the backdrop of the Shaandaar wedding, is a love triangle between (our protagonists) Aliya and Jagjinder Joginder and Bipin (Aliya’s father). Bipin believes there’s no guy that will be good enough for his daughter while Aliya is a dreamer but her dreams are whacked out and Jagjinder Joginder is a doer, he can make anything happen! …And for obvious reasons Bipin hates Jagjinder Joginder.
The journey of Aliya, Jagjinder Joginder and Bipin in the chaotic and lavish wedding is the story of Shaandaar.
Know more about the captain of the Ship, the director: Bahl started his career with advertising, working for several years in client servicing, before joining UTV Spotboy. In 2011, he started Phantom Films, along with Anurag Kashyap, Vikramaditya Motwane and Madhu Mantena. Over the years as a director he has worked with film directors like Vishal Bhardwaj, Anurag Kashyap, Rajkumar Gupta and Vikramaditya Motwane.
Also in 2011, he co-directed Chillar Party and won the National Film Award for Best Screenplay, along with Nitesh Tiwari and Vijay Maurya. The film also garnered the National Film Award for Best Children’s Film. In 2014 came his independent directorial venture, Queen starring Kangana Ranaut, which received critical and popular acclaim.
My Gut Feel and comments:
I have watched the trailer of “Shaandaar” three times back to back, just to figure out why it didn’t appeal to me in the first place. One can relate a film like this to Dharma production, however not sure what is there in this project that made Anurag Kashyap co-produced it. Although yes in recent time Anurag and Karan have shown mutual admiration for each other. Anurag also directed Karan in Bombay Velvet.
I find it hard to correlate the movie to its director Vikas Bahl who has been associated with experimental cinema both as an associate producer and as a director. He was the creative producer of “No one killed Jessica”, associated producer for films like Udaan and Dev D. Co-producer for films like Aamir and Welcome to Sajjanpur. He has also produced and directed two awesome films named Chillar Party and Queen.
Somehow I’m getting a feeling of everything getting forced upon in this movie, be it the humor or characters. It seems to be a bumpy ride with an inconsistent screenplay and stretched second half.
Although films like this do well at box office these days just because of strategic selection of dates and releasing multiple prints, where movie do recover the money in the first weekend only.
I am not writing off this movie out rightly as I am sure it would have some funny interesting moments however as a package it does not appeal to me.
Written By: Rajat Narula
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