Honest take on ageless love bogged down

Angrezi Mein Kehte Hain shows the other side of Bollywood. Small towns, realistic stories and sincere performers are inhabitants of this small world.

The film’s subject is the mid-life crisis that hits married couples, especially in a middle class milieu. For Yashwanth (Sanjay Mishra), employed at the Postal department in Varanasi, marriage is all about responsibilities. His parochial attitude bothers his wife Kiran (Ekavali Khanna). She craves for love, understanding and some time spent on sweet nothings.

Your blood boils at Yashwanth’s patriarchy, even as you sympathise with his wife and his college-going daughter Preeti (Shivani Raghuvanshi), who are living a life of compromise. But the bubble bursts one day and the women decide to find their voice. Preeti marries Jugnu (Anshuman Jha), her love, much to the shock of Yashwanth, and Kiran leaves the house following a fallout with Yashwanth.

There is another track involving Firoz (Pankaj Tripathi), a man unconditionally in love with his ailing wife. Yashwanth takes a cue from the happy couple. Director Harish Vyas attempts to drive home the point that love is best understood when expressed.

AMKH loses rhythm when Yashwanth decides to win his wife back. Gifting a rose or writing a ‘love letter’ are jaded tricks in a plot. A small scale family drama need not always involve dense and melodramatic dialogues. A good dose of humour would have helped. The characters are well-rounded but an air of predictability looms over the film.

Despite the issues, AMKH is a nice watch, largely because of the brilliant cast. The ease at which Sanjay Mishra aces every scene is amazing. Ekavalli and Shivani underplay their roles brilliantly. Pankaj, though in a cameo, is the icing on the cake.

AMKH is a film with simple ambitions. It ends with Yashwanth saying: “Har film ka hero Shah Rukh Khan hona zaroori nahi. Aap or mere jaise aam aadmi bhi ho skate hai.” That’s the important message here for an industry that’s tilted unproportionally towards the starry, glossy and the larger-than-life world.