Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola - A Review

What seemed to be like a simple story decorated with funny dialogues, turned out to be much more. Political satire and rom-com are one of the many categories the movie can be put under. Nevertheless it’s the first movie of this year worth watching or at least giving a try. It’s a mélange of adorable characters with some serious and some out of the way issues. Vishal Bharadwaj has successfully converted the whimsical story into a 160minutes long light-hearted and watchable movie. Tolerable? Yes. Enjoyable? Yes. Emotion-triggering? Not at all.

When some of the best actors of the country like Pankaj Kapur and Shabana Azmi are involved in the movie, the performance has to be highly commendable and it, without a trace of doubt, is. While Anushka Sharma looks dazzling like never before, Imran Khan’s new look is impressive too.

The storyline? Well, there isn’t any one story line, there are many. Not confusing, but meandering would be the word that would perfectly describe the storyline. From alcohol issues to corruption issues to love dilemma, the story went in what seems like all the possible directions.

Characters? Crazy yet practical, greedy yet adorable.

While the movie hardly had moments of boredom yet the story needed a longer duration or a less amount of wandering to bring out the best of the moments of the movie.

In a nutshell? The alcoholic Mandola (Pankaj Kapur) needed to leave his drinking habits in order to avoid being the better person he becomes when drunk. A debauched minister, Choudhari Devi (Shabana Azmi) conspired with him to seize the farmlands of the village named after him so that an industrial complex can be built. The impending marriage of Bijlee (Anushka Sharma) and Baadal (Arya Babbar), the minister’s son would be a mutually beneficial alliance. Apart from being Mandola’s driver and the poor’s messiah, Matru (Imran Khan) had an additional job to stop him from drinking too much of the local beer, Gulabo, deprivation of which caused Mandola to have frequent hallucinations of the pink buffalo we saw so many times in the trailers.

While the first part showed the many aspects and characters of the movie, the second part dealt with completing the story by giving the farmers their land back, ridding the village of the corrupted minister, ridding Mandola of both his drinking habits and hallucinations, and like all Bollywood movies, throwing Bijlee into the arms of her lover Matru.

Conclusion? If you want to watch a good movie to trigger your emotions of sorrow, patriotism or love, better read a novel. If you want to have a good time, this movie will give you one for sure.