Gulabo Sitabo Review

Due to the Corona Virus pandemic, there was a debate whether films should wait for the theaters to open up or just release on OTT platforms…

One of the films the distributors were particularly upset about, is the film I am reviewing today.

Gulabo Sitabo.

Having seen the film, its safe to say… The Distributors were scared for no reason at all. This film would have flopped badly at the box office and taken along a lot of distributor wealth along with it…

The director Soojit Sircar has made some good films, such as Piku and Vicky Donor, he also made the snoozefest October. So I started the film with an open mind.

I started seeing it at 12:12 Am on 12th of June! But roughly 45mins into the film, I fell asleep. My wife paused the film as I slept off for the night! Today I started again after rewinding for the 5 minutes or so when I had slept off and again, roughly 40 mins after resuming the film, I slept off again!

This time I woke up within a few minutes and managed to finish the film. I wonder how frustrated I would have been if I had paid good money to see this in theaters!

Firstly, the film is slow. VERY VERY slow. The comedy is trying to be so subtle that it is non existent, just the comedy sound track makes it through without the acting, script or dialogs having anything funny in them.

If they were trying to make an absurdist character piece, then the characters are too bland and not 3 dimensional at all. They all feel like a writer’s room character sketch done in 2 lines and dragged across an entire feature film’s length. This is like a 5 min comedy sketch that has been stretched across 2 hours.

Amitabh Sir’s acting is good, he manages to portray an old man very effectively as he himself is of a similar age. However, the entire character of Mirza is very flat. He has nothing inside other than the external quirks the writers decided to give him.

Ayushmann Khurrana plays a common man, his acting is also fine, but his character doesn’t have any good moments and the story/plot gives him no chance to shine. His character has no impact on the story or on the viewer!

The story is also non existent and pretty much nothing happens the entire film other than the above mentioned two characters bickering over a dilapidated mansion which they presently call home.

Even for the climax of the film, nothing really happens.No twist of plot or moment of understanding, which would surprise the audience or provide any sort of closure to the story.

There is no journey of the characters and both the main leads remains exactly the same by the end of the film as they were in the start of it… making the entire film completely pointless.

Since this is streaming on Prime which means effectively its free to watch if you have amazon Prime, then by all means do see this film. Its good remedy for insomnia.

Rating : 5/10. Flat Characters, non-moving story and pointless plot.

P.S: SPOILERS ALERT.

I had expected that by the end of the film, the mansion they have been bickering over would Fall apart / Get destroyed in the storm. If that were the case, the whole film would have just clicked into place. The very thing everyone covets would have been taken out of the equation, forcing the characters to take a hard look at their own frailties. The film foreshadowed the collapse of the mansion many times, but finally did not come though on it… sometimes the writers try to subvert audience expectations and manage to just make plain boring film with no head or tail.