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Apna Sapna Money Money

Movie Apna Sapna Money Money Director Sangeeth Sivan Cast Jackie Shroff, Sunil Shetty, Ritesh Deshmukh, Riya Sen

Deepa Gahlot

Audiences today, particularly youngsters, are a little more aggressive in their demand for entertainment. And of late, comedies are being patronized by them in a big way, and nobody is in the least offended by vulgarity or lewd gags any more. They would skip a highly-hyped Aishwarya Rai-Abhishek Bachchan starrer like Umrao Jaan, and catch a Ritesh Deshmukh film Apna Sapna Money Money, if it promises entertainment. The director Sangeet Sivan’s Kya Kool Hain Hum, littered with gross gags of the sexual variety was a surprise hit. It was inevitable that his next film belong to the same genre. What is a little surprising is that Subhash Ghai’s banner produced it. Films like this depend on how fast and furious the gags can go, and how many crazy characters can be fitted in-- the plot is of no consequence. In ASMM a 50-crore booty in diamonds goes missing, when a gangster’s (Jackie Shroff) moll (Celina Jaitley) hides them in a sleeping man’s bag, to throw off a pursuing cop (Suniel Shetty). The bag itself has been stolen by conman Krishna (Ritesh Deshmukh), who is on his way to Mumbai to help his cousin Arjun (Shreyas Talpade) speed up his slow-moving love story. Arjun’s girl (Riya Sen) has a half-blind father (Anupam Kher), who hates him, but when Krishna lands up in drag, he falls for him/her. Krishna is being pursued by a gang from Nepal, whom he had conned, and the leader (Chunky Pandey) is mad at him—which necessitated the drag act. Jumping into the mayhem is a cowherd (Rajpal Yadav) whose ambition in like is to be like Amitabh Bachchan in Sarkar. Not a minute passes when a gag about the human anatomy is not pushed into the film, and with a man in drag, the bawdiness quotient is considerably higher. Celina Jaitley and Koena Mitra are there in the film, only for the skin show, they have nothing else to do. It’s not as if comedy cannot be made without vulgarity—recent comedies like Golmaal, Malamaal Weekly did with a bare minimum of crudity, Khosla Ka Ghosla had none at all. Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Chatterjee, Sai Paranjpye and Gulzar have set a precedent for clean family comedies, but those are tough to do. Why bother with genuine humour, when oranges stuffed into bras get the titter? What the film has done, however, is move Ritesh Deshmukh centrestage and establish him as the local Jim Carrey. Very few actors could do the drag bit without looking sheepish—Ritesh not just looks nice in female clothes, he does not overdo it and turn it into caricature. ASMM may not be everybody’s idea of fun, but the ‘masses’ are not that discriminating, as the encouraging box-office opening of the film has proved.