It seems that since the rediscovery of Punjabi Cinema in the last few years, now everyone or anyone with loads of money considers himself, ready and capable of making a film project all of a sudden. In fact that exactly is the reason why the market has been recently flooded with so many poor, below average and mediocre products served in the name of comedy, a genre which is (mistakenly) taken to be a sure shot winner in Punjab. Now the recently released ISHQ GARAARI is also a similar project made with the same mindset without any basic storyline, concept or vision which confidently tries to fool the audience with almost nothing in its 2+ hours of duration, except few good songs.
The film begins vaguely and then goes on including too many sub-plots of aspiring singers, mad fans, kidnapping, mistaken identities and more without following any specific direction. And that is the reason why after a while it turns out to be nothing but a sum of below average writing, direction and acting despite presence of few known actors from Mumbai. Nevertheless to give you a precise idea about its absurdity, the following are some conclusions derived from my experience of watching ISHQ GARAARI and the points should say it all without any hiding.
1. Firstly Punjabi Cinema, at present is walking on a dicey path of featuring the renowned Punjabi singers only as the lead actors in all its major projects. But if one or two established singers have proved themselves in the acting field, it doesn’t mean that all other singers can also prove the same playing the lead roles. And you can easily experience this bitter truth by watching the below par performances in ISHQ GARAARI.
2. Secondly, it’s ok and interesting too if you see your film as an opportunity to play spoof on your personal business rivals and make fun of them. But that cannot and should not be done on the cost of interfering in the film forcibly. (IG has a clearly pointing spoof played on Punjab’s famous music company and its owners, which is also quite deliberate and irritating mostly.)
3. Sometimes even talented actors find themselves caught in a silly project, standing helplessly in the middle of a ridiculous scene. And you can feel the same watching Prabhleen Sandhu (of SHAHID fame) playing a small role in ISHQ GARAARI and to some extent Ranvijay too acting awkwardly in his pathetic scenes.
4. It has been repeatedly noted that the Background Score has always been the highly neglected or casually taken departments in Punjabi Cinema and one can easily notice the clear ignorance for the same in this recent release too.
5. One of the most difficult genres in movie world is Comedy as it is comparatively easier to make people cry but quite difficult to make them all laugh together on a particular sequence. Now though improvisation on the spot by some talented actors may work most of the times, still a complete script is ideally required even for a comedy, before commencing the shoot, properly read (& grasped) by the entire team.
However here it seems as if most of the scenes in IG have been written on the spot while the shoot is on, since they neither have any basic purpose nor finesse in their final placement in the end product. To say it all, the scenes are certainly good enough to make interesting 30 second teasers for promoting the film on various platforms. But putting them all together as a complete film (without any set vision), doesn’t work at all and falls flat.
On a concluding note, the above mentioned observations should clearly reveal the basic framework of ISHQ GARAARI, which can be easily called as 'Intolerable' even if you are a big fan of any one of the ‘Singing Stars’ featuring in it. And I don’t think anything else needs to be stated here to define this (another) forgettable attempt from Punjabi cinema, which is fast becoming the victim of its own pool of talent, willing to en-cash the ongoing trend blindly, instead of making worth watching films for its energetic audience.
Rating : 1 / 5 (and that too strictly for its few good tracks providing the much needed relief moments.)
