Atithi Bhooto Bhava doesn’t stand a ghost of a chance

Many years ago when life was so much easier to cope with, there lived a ghost played by Naseeruddin Shah in Chamatkar. He made us laugh because he was ….well, silly and goofy and fun in an infantile kind of way.

Cut to 2022. In Director Hardik Gajjar’s _Atithi Bhoot Bhavo_, stand-up comedian Srikant (Pratik Gandhi) meets a 55-year-old Sardarji ghost Makhan Singh, played by Jackie Shroff (trying hard not to look bored) while peeing under a tree in a drunken stupor.

This sequence is potentially funny. Its writers (Shreyes Anil Lowlekar, Pradeep Srivastava, Aniket Wakchaure) must have fallen off their chairs writing scene after scene where ghost Makhan Singh can be seen only by Srikant, and no one else. Taking a road trip from Mumbai to a village in Uttar Pradesh to be reunited with his long-lost love Manju, Makhan insists on sitting in the front seat next to the driver Srikant’s female colleague (Divinaa Thackur), who wants to know why Srikant is not sitting in the front seat with her.

More from Entertainment

'Border 2' Movie Review: Sunny Deol, Varun Dhawan, Diljit Dosanjh and Ahaan Shetty’s film thrives on pure nostalgia; that’s it Music composer Palash Muchhal files Rs 10 crore defamation lawsuit against Vidnyan Mane after cheating accusation

“Because there is a ghost sitting in the front,” Srikant deadpans.

The colleague thinks it is a joke. But it is not. Ha ha ha.

How much more laboured can the humour get? Sometimes it feels like Indian cinema is ageing in reverse. Pratik Gandhi, such a winsome natural actor in Applause Entertainment and Hansal Mehta’s web series on Harshad Mehta, struggles here with anaemic flat material, trying to find some chuckles in a plot that is cadaverously compromised.

The dost-ghost joke doesn’t have the fuel to sustain one episode of a Gujarati sitcom. It is stretched beyond endurance by a script that insists on flogging a dead horse.

The true-love angle that is thrown into the intended comedy has some potential to uplift the deadweight material. The director seems to be doing a quick-fix version about love then and love now, a la Imtiaz Ali’s _Love Aaj Kal_. But the attempts at layering love with humour are painfully sluggish. At times the actors seem to be taking their cues for their punchlines from an off-camera prompter. Elsewhere they seem to be on their own with not even a ghost to guide them out of the frozen mess of a plot.

Initially, the plot constructs Srikant as an irresponsible boyfriend to Netra (Sharmin Segal). They bicker about the mirchi in the omelette. Their conflict seems as undercooked as the omelette.

A sense of narrative flatness hits the endeavour from the word go. I wish Pratik Gandhi would be given better projects. He deserves a lot better than this stretched-out extended version of a sitcom based on a one-note joke.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

Read all the  Latest News,  Trending News,  Cricket News,  Bollywood News,  India News and  Entertainment News here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.