Bhootnath

Director: Vivek Sharma

A ghost and a boy: that’s what Bhootnath is about. It would have been a cracker of a ‘family entertainer’ if debutant director Vivek Sharma had held his focus firmly on the main track. And persuaded his producer Ravi Chopra to keep the film at a tight one-and-a-half hours, instead of the stretched-out two-and-a-half.

Young Banku (Aman) comes to live in a haunted house in Goa, with his mom (Juhi). That a Bollywood brat will be called ‘naughty’ by his parents and teachers (how about, for heaven’s sake, a more appropriate word — ‘naughty’ makes you think of Victorian misses giving their nannies a hard time) is a given. Fortunately, Banku walks and talks like a real child, not an automated robot with a sing-song voice, so his chirpy tete-a-tetes with Bhootnath (Amitabh) are amusing, till the novelty starts wearing off.

There are loose ends, unseemly in a well-made film: Rajpal Yadav, who plays a wavering drunk infesting the house suddenly disappears without explanation (what was he doing there in the first place?); Juhi Chawla’s chandelier danglers turn into studs within a sequence, and Amitabh’s Bhootnath cleans up his filthy self inexplicably after he’s befriended by Banku: do ghosts have to be grubby?

And then it comes: post interval, you discover you’ve all along been watching Baaghban 0.2 — the poor ol’ bhoot is actually just a heart-broken father, who’s been let down by a son (Priyanshu), who upped and left for videsh, and never came back. Out come the hankies, and the nostrums. It is, after all, a B R Chopra production: unless you can wring tears, it’s not really a film, right?

The kitty party aunties who swarmed the first-day-first-show were having a grand time, sniffling away. The film has been released to coincide with the summer holidays, so sure, take the...