Directors: Raj Mehta
Writer: Jineesh K Joy
Producer: Karan Johar
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Emraan Hashmi, Nushrratt Bharuccha, Diana Penty
Crew: Raj Mehta, Karan Johar
You've got to give Dharma Productions credit. As producers of adaptations, the company appears to have mastered the art of completely misinterpreting the source material, taking the essence of the original, discarding it as though it were decoration, and glamorising the meagre remains with a blitz of glitter and humour. This is despite having given India's post-liberalization era some of its most iconic commercial films and characters. First, they removed all caste references from the Marathi movie Sairat (2016) before converting the caste system into a plot for Dhadak (2018).
Finally, they gave us Selfiee, a movie based on the Malayalam movie Driving Licence (2019). The original films are not always awful adaptations. Their background score resists letting your eyes go sleepy and they have a strong sense of narrative rhythm and drama. They merely fail to see the significance of the tale they are delivering. A fan and a movie star butt heads in the odd and beautiful two-hero vengeance story Driving Licence. Suraj Venjaramoodu plays Kuruvilla, an admirer and RTO inspector who betrays his idol, superstar Hareendran, as a result of a miscommunication (Prithviraj Sukumaran).
Hareendran needs a driver's licence to film a scene, but Kuruvilla won't provide it to him. When does your need for self respect turn into a display of your ego, according to the movie? Driving Licence's appeal lies in its insistence on obfuscating the line between protagonist and adversary; they are both both. There is no right or wrong in this situation; instead, two macho egos are battling it out. Your sympathies shifts from side to side during a scene, from fan to star to fan. Self-respect when it solidifies, congeals, and transforms into ego is the main challenge.
This reasoning is entirely refuted in the movie Selfiee, which stars Emraan Hashmi as the fan and Akshay Kumar as the star. In the movie Driving Licence, Prithviraj gives Hareendran a cocky but unappealing sense of arrogance. His rage is blatant and outspoken. His frowns erupted. His edge gives him his coolness, and that edge keeps driving the plot along and stirring up the audience. Hareendran gives Kuruvilla the middle finger in one of the film's most enraged but fashionable scenes.
Not nearly as provocative is dared to be in the Hindi translation. Selfiee appears to be bound by a contract to not have an edge. In his role as Vijay, Akshay Kumar is not permitted to even raise an ironic eyebrow. He is a dreary imitation of what Dharma Productions wants us to believe Hindi film stars are—a earnest do-gooder. Because he is such a flaccid nothingburger, no one would even give him the attention required to boycott him, making him the antidote to #BoycottBollywood. To ensure that we never lose sight of the fact that the movie is fiction, the film even opens with a disclaimer in which Kumar informs us that he is not the hero and that he loves his fans and owes his success to them.
Selfie thinks its audience is illiterate, incapable of differentiating between a representation and the real world. Nevertheless it has the gall to dumb down a brilliant movie for this ignorant audience.
For all intents and purposes, Vijay is the movie's lead character. Emraan Hashmi is cast in the antagonistic role of RTO sub-inspector Om Prakash Agarwal in this careless rewrite. With his smirks and abrupt spurts of that rounded Bhopali accent—yes, Selfiee is set in Bhopal—his is the ego that so insistently pops to the surface. Bhopal: Why? Selfiee's Bhopal is at best an aesthetic respite, allowing for some top shots of the city as a sports car revs through it and giving the main antagonist an accent that lacks both polish and comfort, similar to Malayalam movies that take a certain casual joy in setting their films in a local, worn-in world.
The food, the dress, the theatres, and the way that houses are constructed and decorated in this City are all devoid of joy. Selfiee was filmed by Rajeev Ravi, who also gave us No Smoking (2007), DevD (2009), and Bombay Velvet (2015); whose frames have leaked sepia and colour with such a wild artistry; who has made smoke look like puffy clouds blown out of rounded mouths; therefore the dullness of this scene is shocking. However, Ravi's frames in this movie have the most irritating lighting, such as a dining table that is so dimly lit that the fluorescent blue fish tank stands out; bright, flat interiors; bright, flat lighting of the face where an afternoon cannot be distinguished from a morning or an evening; and so on.
The last hour of the movie is filled with stress because a flight needs to be caught, but as we get closer to that point, it looks as like Bhopal's daylight is frozen in place. Ravi appears to have been engaged to perform the complete opposite of what his filmography has shown. It seems like Dharma Productions is on a quest to blend talent until it is difficult to tell it apart. Selfiee loses its edge by attempting to promote Vijay as a star. Selfiee was born from a concept that aimed to normalise both the hero and the fan as humans whose affection for each other is not unconditional.
With cliched, on-the-nose jokes, director Raj Mehta and writer Rishhabh Sharrma strive to liven up the action. Mehta has a solid and impressive command of this. The humour, which has a decked-out actress farting in her lover's arms while they are filming, has an erratic aspect that completely dissolves any tension and tramples over any emotional fluctuation. As an illustration, consider the tense scene in which Om Prakash's wife (Nushrratt Bharuccha) calls him after witnessing him getting beaten up on television. She inquires as to his well-being after observing the harassment he endured. She uses the term "pel diya," and because of the inherent humor's unanticipated and stark contrast to the gravity of the circumstance, I started laughing out loud in the theatre.
A movie like Selfiee needs to be a sensitive dance between serious emotions and lighthearted humour. Maturity is what it most requires to attain this equilibrium. But where can you discover this in a movie that willfully ignores the meaning of a text?
Ultimately, Selfiee is a light-hearted film with some enjoyable performances and some belly-laughable scenes. This can be a fantastic choice if you want to spend the weekend with a funny movie.
Note
Hotshot actor Vijay Kumar urgently needs a driver's licence to finish his shoot in time while filming a movie in Bhopal. However, they end up having a type of feud after miscommunication with Om Prakash, the vehicle inspector. While he argues that the hero must officially obtain the licence like any commoner, which may take up to a month, Vijay's enthusiastic supporter turns against him. Yet in a week, Vijay must depart for the US. Will he obtain the licence prior to leaving?
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