‘Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video’ review: A tacky lowbrow comedy

The year is 1997. The setting is Rishikesh. It’s a time just before mobile phones, when DVDs were still predominant. Writer-director Raaj Shaandilyaa’s film opens with a shoddily executed computer graphic of a train hurtling towards a forlorn man on the tracks. This is the eponymous Vicky, played by Rajkummar Rao. It’s much like Rao’s year which has been speeding along strongly, but will eventually have to come to a halt. Unfortunately, the Rao train has been derailed by this most unintelligible 152-minute-long romantic comedy that is built around a slim plot line.

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Newly married couple Vicky, an ambidextrous henna artist, and doctor Vidya (Triptii Dimri) record their honeymoon night as a keepsake. But when the private sex video goes missing, it becomes Vicky’s mission to retrieve the missing disc before his missus finds out and before the contents destroy their reputation.

Alongside this senseless quest (for some reason the couple never searches their own room or the house but charges all across Rishikesh in a race against time), there are comic tropes like two women in the same house with the same name. Vicky’s sister Chanda (Malika Sherawat) catches the fancy of an investigating police officer, who confuses her for the house help, also called Chanda. The enamoured cop, Laadle, is played with inexplicable enthusiasm by Raaz. Vicky’s grandfather (Tiku Talsania) wears an eye patch, and some child in the house (the relationship isn’t made clear) has a lisp such that he repeatedly says ‘Faktimaan’ instead of ‘Shaktimaan’. Then there’s a local politician who organises community weddings, a pervert with a camera, a goon with two henchmen who are called Sunil and Shetty who speak in Sunil Shetty’s distinct drawl. There’s even a scene in a graveyard, where a wedding sari wearing ghost appears, clearly a reference to Rao’s hit Stree films. Most disturbing, however, was watching Archana Puran Singh as Vidya’s tobacco-chewing mother.

The humour is low-brow, the production tacky, the period setting is cosmetic, mainly demonstrated by rotary phones and big hairdos for the men. Oddly, the 2004 song ‘Sajna ve sajna’ (‘Chameli’) is used for an item number and, more fittingly, Daler Mehndi shows up to perform ‘Na na na re’ from the 1997 film ‘Mrityudata’.

Finally, one feels no sympathy or empathy for either Vicky or Vidya. Dimri and Rao are fine when in their own lanes but are hardly given a chance to step out and impress. For Rao, in particular, playing a small-town boy facing a harrowing situation seems to be a rinse-repeat mode.

The climax becomes a platform to preach about privacy, women’s rights and dignity. It’s a testing monologue, adding to the already tiresome screenplay (Shaandilyaa, Yusuf Ali Khan, Ishrat Khan, Rajan Agarwal) that shifts tonally, forgets about its central theme and story and often discards the principal characters. 

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