Hichki: The film belongs to young actors

Rani mukerji has made a come back with Hichki. Even before the brief sabbatical, she had not given any performance worth mentioning. Though she was praised for her performance in Mardani, she still remains an artist whose potential has not really been explored. Off and on, the skilled actor in her sparkles in the various roles she had played.

Since Hichki offered some thing different than run-of-the-mill Hindi cinema, it was but natural that Rani would shine as a protagonist. And she does. But the film belongs to the actors who play students (and they are so many! Believe me, not a single teenage actor disappoints), particularly Harsh Mayar who plays 'Aatish’.

The story is simple. To those who have read and watched 'To Sir With Love’, the only new thing would be the Tourette Syndrome. A young woman with a rare disorder called Tourette Syndrome aspires to be a teacher, but because she stammers and abruptly makes odd gestures, she is rejected time and again. Finally, she gets a job in her old school and has to manage a class of 14 rowdy students. How she turns these unruly poor kids into academically successful ones is the story.

The film is about freeing ourselves of our presumptions too; that a person who stammers can't be a teacher; that only rich and middle-class students can excel in academics; that teaching can be done only in class rooms. In brief, it tries to say that people excel outside the stereotypes too and we should be open to out-of-box ideas and people. In between are the glimpses of her the protagonist’s difficult relationship with her father, who apparently left his wife and children because he could not fix her Tourette and was embarrassed of her awkward sounds in public. The story is inspiring of course and the actors brilliant. The director Siddharth Malhotra could actually make a far better film with such talent but sadly that is not the case.

The film slackens in phases. Dailogues are very weak . Had the dialogues been tighter, this slackness could have faded. Then it seems the person who wrote them did not really know Hindi. In Hindi for example, we do not 'wear’ nail paint, we apply it on nails (lagaate hain, pahante nahi). That's perhaps why the film doesn't impress you as much as Three idiots, Taare Zameen Par or Chak de! india did. Unfortunately, English has so overpowered Hindi in cinema that even the basic grammar of the language is not paid attention to, which makes the dialogues lose their impact.

But it's a good effort, specially the young actors. Watching Rani after a long time is a pleasure. A one-time watch and you will come out of the hall a little inspired, if nothing else.