‘Chhichhore’ looks like Raju Hirani’s world without Aamir

After ‘Dangal’ everybody presumed Aamir Khan would once again team up with the very talented director Nitesh Tiwari.

Now we know why Aamir is not in Chhichhore. The film, as reflected in the lengthy and loquacious trailer, looks like the world Aamir, Madhavan, Sharman and Co inhabited in Hirani’s 3 Idiots. There is Sushant Singh Rajput, all ‘small-towned’ and hair-slickened with a vacuous grin arriving at the college hostel with dreams in his eyes and an itch in his pants. There is Varun Sharma, who for a change, seems the smarter among the two friends.

Sushant plays the wide-eyed ingénue to the hilt. When the girl on the campus Shraddha Kapoor, looking like a long-lost cousin of Ayesha Jhulka from Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar and Kajol’s mooh-boli bahen in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, touches Sushant (most appropriately) he makes a noise like someone fingering a raw wound. Ouch!

These’re unknown actors playing eager novices in a campus filled with hilarious hopes and kooky aspirations, the kind we saw recently in that under-celebrated web series Kota Factory. More interesting than both Sushant and Varun is the gallery of unexposed faces playing the student fraternity. They all seem exceptionally talented. Lest we forget, director Nitesh Tiwari gave us talents like Zaira Wasim and Fatima Sana Shaikh in Dangal. Zaira has now quit. Fatima is trying to seek and find her level.

It’s time for the boys to make some noise. The mood on Tiwary’s college campus is earnest and irrepressible. Then quickly the trailer’s tempo transforms to a willowy midlife crisis with all the students transformed physically by adept prosthetics into householders, and it is a not-so-subtle swing-shift of mood from the prankish to somber with Rajput’s screen-son in hospital as the old friends gather together to tackle the tragedy on hand.

Okay guys, I CU.

Curiously the trailer gives away the entire plot of the film. And that’s a good thing. Nitesh Tiwari knows it’s the first trailer that decides a film’s fate. Chhichhore (I am yet to figure out the number of ‘h’s in the title) wins you over with its sincerity, simplicity, transparency and straightforwardness.

Judging by the trailer I don’t think the film has anything very new or profound to tell. Nor is there a major social comment here. Like the best cinematic experiences this one takes us through experiences that we all know, without getting over-familiar. It knows how far to go and where to stop.