Ferrari ki Sawaari

A cloyingly sweet story gets stumped trying to bridge a kiddie cricket fantasy with an adult automobile romance

Were the film Ferrari Ki Sawaari  to go through a medical examination, glucose levels  in its celluloid would be abnormally high. A small Parsi family in Mumbai, all cricket  connected, live in a sugar-coated world where cricket is a metaphor for heaven. The boy is a gifted batsman, the  Dad is a scrupulously upright head clerk in the Regional Transport Office and Grandpa is a one-time Ranji player whose career was destroyed by a bouncer he lost sight of (Nari Contractor comes to mind).
That is one half of the picture. The other is a makeover job on the grimy city of Mumbai. Everything looks glossy here,  particularly Sachin Tendulkar’s Ferrari. The idea, thought up by a fast talking Punjabi wedding planner (Seema Bhargava), is that the Dad, Rustom Deboo (Sharman Joshi), should use his cricket contacts to borrow Sachin’s Ferrari for a wedding she is planning.  She would then pay him a lakh-and-a-half for the favour, and that should be just about enough for Rustom to send his son, Kayo (Ritvik Sahore), to play at Lord’s.

It’s a shady deal if you ever saw one, and the obsessively honest  Rustom,  who has so far set an example of high integrity for his son, falls for it.  Not only that, he borrows the car without Sachin’s permission—that is to say, he steals it.  First of all, this is completely out of character for Rusy, and second, since the Ferrari bit is not a subplot but an entirely new plot, the film takes off on this detour of exclusive cars in India. Fascinating stuff, but connecting all this to cricket is an impossible job, and the plot caves in.

Caught between two stories, a kiddie cricket fantasy and an adult automobile romance, the film doesn’t work.  A gorgeous Ferrari and a gorgeous woman (Vidya Balan in the item number Mala Jau De) is what you are left to chew the cud with.

comedyFerrariSachin Tendulkar