Vaalvi: A Marathi crazy crime caper that will have you in splits

Paresh Mokashi, who gave us that lovely biopic Harishchandrachi Factory on Dadasaheb Phalke is back. This time, he takes us on a totally different wacky and frenetic excursion. I would call it a joyride with three corpses and three culprits in a car on New Year’s Eve. But crime is not nice. It never pays off, etc etc.

Mokashi has actually made a deliciously irreverent though frightfully improper satire on a crime of passion. How do I say something about the plot without giving too much away? As written by Madhugandha Kulkarni and Mokashi, Vaalvi which means termite, has enough twists and turns to make us vertiginous. Obviously modeled on the twisty black-humour genre of Sriram Raghavan’s Andhadhun (look what Raghavan started!), this is the story of a poor lonely mentally disturbed woman Avani (Anita Date-Kelkar) who nobody wants alive. Not her husband Aniket (Swwapnil Joshi), not his mistress (Shivani Surve) and later midway through this maelstrom of mirthful mayhem, Avani’s therapist Anshuman (Subodh Bhave) also wants her dead.

No wonder, Avani ends up dead and travelling on the backseat of a car with her three ill-wishers. As the mentally disturbed Avani, Anita Date-Kelkar has to play as dead as Satish Shah in Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron. She gets it…errrr…. dead right. Later, just for company, she is joined by two other corpses in the car.

In less than two hours, this film packs in enough punch to make the proceedings suitably breathless. At times I did notice the screenplay getting ahead of itself. The torrent of incidents could have been lowered a peg or two.

This apart, Vaalvi is delightfully iconoclastic in its attitude towards middleclass morality. The characters don’t think twice before plunging into a life of crime as long as they get what they want. Two of the murders are committed by a woman who even suggests that they cut up one of the murder victims into pieces: a dreadful invocation of the recent Walker case .

Mokashi is not in this for political correctness. Vaalvi is a quirky crime caper with no moral compass breathing down its neck. All the actors seem to have fun with their despicable characters. The messy slush of immorality and the breakneck speed of narration leave all questions of right and wrong quietly inert in the corner.

There are no song breaks, no subplots. Just three unscrupulous opportunists and three of their victims all driving down a highway with no stop signs.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and Instagram.