What were your college days like?
Mine were a blur of bad jokes, glorious friendships,
heady romances, illicit pastimes and mostly
forgettable lectures despite which, somehow
we all came away with an education.
Chichhore gets all this.
Director Nitesh Tiwari creates a cocktail
of nostalgia, relationships, family drama
and on-the-nose messaging that does wobble precariously but eventually it lands.
You walk away wanting to be friends with some
of these characters –
for me it was Varun Sharma’s Sexa, 
who I think deserves his own spin-off film.
In college, Sexa is called Hawas ka papita
and Varun nails this lovely phrase with his
deliciously wicked expressions.
He delivers one of the film’s best lines
– Engineering life mein do cheezein sabse
important hain – brain aur Bunty.
Bunty of course being your privates.
But when we see Sexa as an adult, he’s
sitting in London discussing global trends.
I want to know how that happened.
The one-line pitch for Chhichhore is Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar meets 3 Idiots meets Student of the Year.
College friends reunite because one of them
is facing a crisis – Anni’s son Raghav
is in hospital, fighting for his life.
To bolster his spirits, they start to recount their time together when they were engineering students,
living in the H4 hostel.
The H4 boys were unanimously dubbed 'losers'
because the hostel always came last in the
GC or General Championship – a college competition
in which 10 hostels competed in 30 sports
over 2 months.
But these losers decide that 
they will change the narrative.
The screenplay ping-pongs between college
days and present crisis – the journeys mirror
each other, down to the dialogue.
So when one character says something in the
hospital, the retort comes a scene in the
past because the situations 
are so similar in spirit.
The writers Piyush Gupta, Nikhil Mehrotra
and Nitesh stitch the screenplay like a tapestry.
It’s clever but a little too neat.
And it gets predictable very quickly.
It doesn’t help that the scenarios in the
film aren’t new.
We’ve seen all of this before – the nerdy
losers versus the more entitled and affluent bullies,
the good-natured ragging, the canteen
romances, the bonding that creates a family.
There is little in terms of craft 
to dazzle you.
And the music by Pritam is passable 
but not sticky.
And the film, even when dealing with issues
like ragging or the pressure to achieve, stays
in a sanitized space – there is calamity
but no real darkness.
Despite these obvious bumps, what keeps Chhichhore
afloat is the sincerity in its messaging,
the characters and the performances.
We’ve all known guys like this – Acid
played by Naveen Polishetty, the boy who can’t
speak without swearing, Derek played by Tahir
Raj Bhasin, the jaded senior,
Bevda played by Saharsh Kumar, who is basically Devdas without the angst.
He’s always drunk.
And my favorite Mummy played by Tushar Pandey,
who embodies better than anyone else the awkwardness
and vulnerability of youth.
Sushant Singh Rajput as Anni and Shraddha
Kapoor as Maya don’t blend into the surroundings
as easily as the others do.
He’s too confident and 
she’s too obviously cosmetic.
But they make up for this in their older avatars.
Though Shraddha still struggles with an underwritten
role – Maya seems sour even before they
are struck by tragedy.
But Sushant blossoms into the father struggling
to make right his relationship with his son.
His climatic monologue hits home.
The prosthetics aren’t bad but did all of
them need to have receding hairlines?
Has no one heard that 40 is the new 20?
These actors and characters hold together
the flimsy plot.
Nitesh, Nikhil and Piyush also don’t let
the jokes sag.
Pay attention to the supporting characters
– like the guy in charge of student accommodation
and the hostel cook.
Each face is a find.
The one-liners keep coming so that even when
the film tests your patience –
and let me assure you that it does, the championship
games are especially over-stretched –
you will keep rooting for these people to succeed.
Especially for Raghav, 
played by Mohammad Samad.
He looks like a dark-eyed, teenage version
of Jugal Hansraj from Masoom.
You know what that means.
Basically, he grabs your affection from the
first scene and doesn’t let go.
He’s earnest and heartbreakingly sweet.
We want to believe that once upon a time,
we were all as unspoiled.
Chhichore allows us to revisit that 
first flush of youth.
The film is no match for the inspired grunge
vibe of 'In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones'
or the magic of 'Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar'.
But it is a satisfying journey back to those days!
