Cirkus movie review: Sparsely funny, mostly listless Comedy of Errors with a message

Cast: Ranveer Singh, Varun Sharma, Jacqueline Fernandez, Pooja Hegde, Murali Sharma, Siddharth Jadhav, Johnny Lever, Vrajesh Hirjee, Sanjay Mishra, Sulabha Arya, Cameo: Deepika Padukone Director: Rohit Shetty Language: Hindi with a handful of Tamil Two pairs of doppelgangers living in different parts of India land up in the same town. One of them, a man called Roy (Ranveer Singh), is a human conductor of electricity. This quirk of nature has given him a career as The Electric Man in a circus. Whenever he allows bijli through his body, his duplicate in another city – also named Roy (also Ranveer, of course) – gets a massive shock at the exact same time and passes it on to anyone who touches him just then. Each Roy has a sibling called Joy (both played by Varun Sharma). You will learn how this freak situation came about if you watch director Rohit Shetty’s Cirkus, a comedy of errors in which there are inevitable mix-ups involving spouses, lovers, concerned parents and crooks until the truth is revealed at the nth hour. The facts in the preceding paragraphs are all in the trailer. (Spoiler alert for this sentence) What you don’t see in that video is that the Roys and Joys were part of a social experiment by a doctor in the 1940s whose goal was to prove that a human being is a product of their upbringing and not their bloodline. (Spoiler alert ends) The present-day happenings in Cirkus take place in the 1960s, giving the writers an opportunity to spoof that decade and its cinema even while revisiting the Shakespeare classic most frequently adapted by Hindi film comedy writers. Since this is a Rohit Shetty venture, in case you didn’t get the point that Cirkus is an ode to The Bard, early in the film the camera closes in on a large image of him. In its opening half hour or so, Cirkus is not half bad if you are in a mood for some old-fashioned slapstick humour. Old-fashioned cannot mean repetitive though, and too soon it settles into a sameness that comes from recycling a million ideas from earlier films in the genre. Right at the start, for instance, as soon as the Electric Man concept is unveiled, it becomes possible to predict that at some stage we will see an entire chain of human beings affected by Roy’s electric charge. And whaddyaknow, sure enough that moment does come. Unoriginality apart, the film is also quickly afflicted by an absence of energy. At first, it is nice to watch Ranveer’s lack of self-consciousness. Just last December, the actor had shown remarkable restraint in the role of the legendary cricketer Kapil Dev in Kabir Khan’s _83_ . In Cirkus, he flings himself into the sillyfest with unbridled zest for its frivolity. The repeated remixes of old Hindi film hits in the narrative are also enjoyable, as are the other bows to the ’60s in the form of hairstyles, clothes, a villain with a mole on his cheek, a two-wheeler with a sidecar and an obstacle in one Roy’s love story who goes by the moniker Raisaab. The sets are intentionally plasticky, reflecting the film’s intended disconnect from reality, and share space with occasional shots of the natural beauty of Ooty/Udagamandalam where Cirkus is set. There’s only so far that an actor’s innate talent, nostalgia and kitschy images can take a film. Soon enough, Cirkus blurs the line between imitation and tribute, until the fun completely ceases. Sanjay Mishra is initially entertaining, but after a while the clichéd dialogues written for him and other character artistes become a yawn. Men take precedence in this script, but women are not irrelevant – they are just intermittently forgotten before they resurface to play their part in the larger drama. Pooja Hegde is fair enough in the limited writing at her disposal, though the sub-plot involving her secret career is utterly superfluous. On the other hand, Jacqueline Fernandez, who proved in 2016’s _Dishoom_ that she has a penchant for comedy, is strangely unrecognisable and her face curiously frozen into expressionlessness in Cirkus. The characters given the best deal by the script are played by Ranveer, Sanjay and Sulabha Arya. The latter seems to be having a blast playing a gun-toting Tamilian old lady. The comedian Siddharth Jadhav contorts his face and voice into a Johnny Lever II such that when the real Johnny Lever enters the scene late in the day, it feels like he’s been around for a while. Ironically, Rohit Shetty’s much-lambasted comedies give us more authenticity in the use of language in southern Indian settings than most commercial Hindi cinema bothers with. Chennai Express infuriated many south Indians, but the fact remains that in a country where Hindi supremacism is a sad reality, this director got all of north India to happily watch a film in which a sizeable portion of the dialogues were in Tamil. In Cirkus we hear tiny snatches of Tamil (including in the song Current Laga Re for which Deepika Padukone makes an appearance), which is more than can be said of most Hindi cinema located in Tamil Nadu. Cirkus does not position itself as cerebral or realistic, yet in this department, it is better than many films that position themselves as sensible and real. Rohit and Ranveer had teamed up in 2018 for _Simmba_ , a film that made terrible use of sexual violence within its storyline. Cirkus does a better job of delving into societal divisions in the social experiment at its centre, even if the theme is not explored with depth. That’s a small saving grace in a film with its heart in the right place but its writing and direction off key. To get an idea of the triteness in Cirkus, sample this conversation that takes place when Sulabha Arya’s character aims a firearm at a man: He: “Meri Nirupa Roy, give me that toy.” She: “First leave Joy.” How long will Hindi film-goers have to settle for rhyming lines and malapropisms in place of intelligent slapstick? Yes, there is such a thing as “intelligent slapstick”. To make stupidity funny without taking the viewer for granted is an art of which Cirkus is a poor example. Rating: 1.75 (out of 5 stars)  Cirkus is in theatres

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial