Paresh Mokashi, the humourist behind Vaalvi and Naach Ga Ghuma, has turned to his own play from 2001 for his latest movie. Mukkam Post Bombilwaadi is a crackpot comedy about a chapter of history that escaped the school curriculum.
In 1942, in the middle of World War II, Adolf Hitler finds himself in a village in the Konkan. Hitler, lovingly called “Addu” by his lover Eva Braun, has landed in Bombilwaadi while trying to get back to Germany from Japan. Hitler runs into highly excitable members of a theatre group, a theatre-loving and Eva-adoring British police officer and his relatively sensible Indian subordinate.
The stage is set for an incendiary comedy of errors that is always threatening to justify its premise and setting. But like the bomb planted by a pair of would-be revolutionaries that simply refuses to go off, the film doesn’t launch.
The 100-minute Marathi movie can’t quite shed its theatrical origins. Scenes of the actors goofing about and rattling off dialogue at high volume might have been hilarious in a live performance, but they don’t translate into a compelling cinematic experience.
Was the renowned stage performer Bal Gandharva actually a woman? Is Hitler’s toothbrush moustache real or fake? Extremely silly and occasionally funny, Mukkam Post Bombilwaadi stays miles away from edginess, settling for the easy – and forgettable – laughs produced by slapstick comedy.
As Hitler, Prashant Damle is first-rate, always in control of his shenanigans. The cast includes Geetanjali Kulkarni, Vaibhav Mangale, Sunil Abhayankar, Manmeet Pen, Ritika Shrotri and Anand Ingle (as Winston Churchill).
Despite an enthusiastic cast and a healthy appetite for mischief, the movie has neither the ambition nor the sprawl to be anything more than what it is: a bunch of talented actors in a filmed play that made it to the screen in the same mysterious way that Hitler turns up in Bombilwaadi.
