Movie review: 'Super Nani'

If you love Rekha, please watch her older films instead of 'Super Nani' and choose to ignore this one as a terrible mistake

'Super Nani'
U/A; Comedy/Drama;
Director: Indra Kumar
Cast: Rekha, Sharman Joshi, Randhir Kapoor, Rajesh Kumar, Anupam Kher, Shweta Kumar
Rating: 

Rekha and Sharman Joshi in 'Super Nani'. Pic/Santa Banta

If director Indra Kumar is to be believed, Ebola, AIDS, etc. are not really the diseases we should be fretting about. It is actually live-in relationships, the 'American bimari' that we must be panicking about. If you are not married and want to still live with the person you love, well you are a really, really bad person and Indra Kumar, who incidentally made sex comedies like Masti and Grand Masti not so long back, is so going to judge you.

Well, welcome to the regressive world of the director. This time he makes a volte face and decides to put us in a time machine and take us back to the dark ages. In his world this time, the 'good' woman is the grandmother 'bechari kaam ke bojh ki maari' Bharti (Rekha) who relentlessly works for an ungrateful family which gleefully walks all over her. And, of course, the 'horrible' women are the daughter-in-law who wants to pursue her acting career and the daughter who wants to follow her heart and, horror or horrors, wants to live-in with the man she loves before marriage! When Bharti, who was a kathak dancer some four decades ago, is not busy making makkhanwale parathas and force feeding her grown up kids, she prays to God to get her family to respect her. Her only friend is the house help with full make up on.

In comes Mannu (Sharman Joshi), her NRI grandson from America. Mannu, who hasn't bothered to learn to speak Hindi properly and brandishes a fake accent, is, what else, rooting for Indian culture. He also wants to make a supermodel out of the super nani to teach the callous family a lesson and well, so she becomes a much sought after model before you could finish eating half an aloo ka paratha. Apparently, this film is based on a Gujarati play, but whoever thought of this solution to the neglected old woman's problem seriously needs to be checked for some kind of American or otherwise bimari.

If the assault on your aesthetic senses is not enough with the garish background (uncomfortably reminding you of the south Indian cinema of the 80s), and a severely outdated concept, every character in this film is clearly instructed to scream and screech to get their points across.

No idea why the still-so-charming Rekha took up this role — to think she did something similar, but of course, not such a regressive film, 'Khoon Bhari Maang' back in the 80s. If you love Rekha, watch her earlier films instead and choose to ignore this one as a terrible mistake.

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