By Hindustan Times
Direction: Rajesh Mapuskar
Actors: Boman Irani, Sharman Joshi, Ritwik Sahore
Rating: ***
Rustam Deboo (Sharman Joshi) is a person it's possible you'll meet at the streets of Mumbai. He’s the modest Parsi with neatly side-parted hair and round glasses who wears the sudreh-kusti, rides a scooter to work and lives in an old house with an ageing father (Boman Irani as Deboo). He barely manages to make ends meet at the salary of a head clerk on the RTO, yet is honest to a fault — when he runs a red light without getting caught, he finds a cop and insists on paying an excellent. It’s this sort of thing just a Parsi would do.
The one extraordinary thing of their otherwise ho-hum life is Rustam’s son Kayo’s (Ritwik Sahore) talent for cricket. Of course, there are one million parents on this country who believe their boy is the following Sachin Tendulkar. The variation is that, throughout the premise of Ferrari Ki Sawaari, Kayo is the following Sachin Tendulkar who can send a ball scurrying off to the boundary at will.
But Ferrari… isn’t really another cricket movie (and thank God for that). At its heart, it's an underdog story, with an Everyman up against huge odds; the type of movie that we've got come to expect from a Rajkumar Hirani-Vidhu Vinod Chopra script. In both the Munnabhai films, a common, illiterate gangster overreaches himself, first by questioning a rigid medical system after which by fighting corruption and injustice with Gandhigiri; Rancho in 3 Idiots is an unlikely engineering student up against an education system in response to rote-learning.
In first-time director Rajesh Mapuskar’s Ferrari… (Mapuskar was associate director to Hirani on Lage Raho Munnabhai and three Idiots), Rustam fights financial constraints and the politics of cricket selections to fulfil his son’s dream of playing at London’s Lord’s Cricket Ground.
That’s where the Ferrari is available in. The pressing need for money leads Rustam to take a reckless step and ‘borrow’ Sachin Tendulkar’s big red machine. A comedy of errors ensues, involving the marriage of a politician’s son, a hunt for the missing car, and Grandfather Deboo, who has a backstory of his own that, let’s just say, also concerns cricket.
The second 1/2 the movie largely devotes itself to resolving this plot and does so entertainingly, with wit, humour and pathos. There's even a symbolic deus ex machina, with a god that comes riding on a bullock cart. Some stock characters exist purely for comic effect (the politician’s idiot son, Tendulkars’ domestic help and a bumbling security guard), however the central characters are well fleshed out. Sharman, one of the underrated actors in Bollywood, is very convincing because the scrupulous Rustam (it’s astounding that during his 13 years within the industry, that is his first ‘lead’ role). Boman Irani excels because the cynical grandfather (of course, he has a natural advantage in playing a Parsi) and has the superior lines within the movie — at one point, he calls the entire Lord’s affair a “recession scheme” by the West to make money.
The Hirani-Chopra influence, however, pervades the film — a morally upright, large-hearted protagonist; an old, brooding father (not entirely unlike the carrom-playing Parsi dad from Munnabhai), even a magic-realism song sequence.
Yet, judged on its own, Ferrari works as a movie. It’s a narrative of reaching to your dreams, of endearing father-son relationships, and of ethical lessons that aren’t preachy. It’s a formula that rarely fails — this kind of feel-good movie that makes for perfect Sunday viewing with the entire family.
