Roga Howar Shohoj Upaye Movie Review

Debaloy ditches black humour for mindless comedy. In that sense, Debaloy has succesfully made a 'comedy' though it elicits no laughter. Not even a chuckle.

Joy (Parambrata Chatterjee), a five-star hotel's chef, has a foodie wife, Ranjana (Raima Sen). Their blissful life gets disrupted when Ranjana's fear of gaining weight turns into an obsession.

Body shaming, our society’s tendency to equalize beauty with thinness, obsession with the size-zero figure — Debaloy Bhattacharya’s Roga Howar Shohoj Upaye is supposed to be a funny, sarcastic take on all of this. But in order to cater to today's audience, Debaloy ditches black humour for mindless comedy. In that sense, Debaloy has succesfully made a 'comedy' though it elicits no laughter. Not even a chuckle.

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Though the director, who is also the script writer, leaves no stone unturned to make us laugh — dialogues full of sexual innuendos, scenes full of animation and graphics, and an overwhelming number of bizarre dream sequences. Debaloy, as the chief chef, also tries to sprinkle some self-deprecating humour (Joy and Ranjana repeatedly say, “Etake comedy banate hobe. Comedy na holey hit hobe na!”) and philosophy over the khichuri that he has cooked. But as we all know, too many cooks spoil the broth. That’s exactly what has happens with this film. In the total two hours, the first 45 minutes are dedicated to Joy and Ranjana’s relationship. It gets monotonous, because it could have been depicted in half the time. But when Joy proposes to Ranjana in an animated eggplant field, or when comic strip character Bantul The Great comes out of the pages to run a seductive finger along the bulging backside of the slimming-centre lady (Kamalika), you realise that there's no 'shohoj upaye' to make people laugh.

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Actors, however, have put in their best. Parambrata Chatterjee’s Joy has charmed all. So has Raima Sen with her sweetness and vulnerability. Riya Sen, on the other hand, doesn’t have much to do apart from looking sultry and she does that with aplomb. Lastly, Neel Mukherjee as Joy’s boss and Anindya Bose as Ranjana’s drunk boss are the only two characters, whose sequences just about make this film paisa vasool.

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