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When the father gets hitched before the son does
When the father gets hitched before the son does
Romantic comedies, plucked out from anywhere, have a positive carryover effect, more often than not. This is because, aiming at the family audiences, the directors would aim to keep the proceedings clean eschewing the 'sex comedy' approach which would otherwise restrict the potential multiple types of footfalls.
Director Priyadarshan, who has been a multi-lingual film helmsman since 1984 has a tally of 90 films to his credit out of which 22 were Hindi remakes. His 2008 film – Mere Baap Pehle Aap (MBPA) - was the 15th with the next seven getting released over the following five years till 2013. On a different note, if one calculates, he has had a strike rate of one film a year, with his first Hindi reprisal releasing in 1992.
Remade from a 2001 Malayalam hit ' Ishtam', MBPA is a typical middle-class entertainer with a widower father taking care of his two sons and one of them taking up the unenviable task of getting his father hitched to his old ladylove and succeeding after a series of missteps and misunderstandings. Packed with the right mix of humour and emotions, the original which starred Dileep and Navya Nair was a major commercial success.
With a very solid star cast featuring veterans Paresh Rawal (the hero's father) and Naseeruddin Shah (the heroine's daddy) at the top, the movie had Akshaye Khanna and Genelia D'Souza as the lead pair. By then Genelia had put in seven years in the Indian film industry and was a successful heroine in Telugu and Tamil cinema. With this film, she was returning to Hindi movie after a five-year break. The charming character artistes Om Puri and Rajpal Yadav, who were regulars in Priyadarshan flicks were also present in the film to give it a unique kick and recall value.
Another USP of Priyadarshan being a modest size budget, this film too was made at Rs 20 crore and managed a revenue of Rs 36 crore which is considered an 'average' success in the cine parlance. The proof of the director's market value was that he was always backed by producers for with his next one, remade from both Malayalam and Tamil cinema which lent a new genre to Hindi cinema, in the same league, though not entirely, like Hrishikesh Mukherjee. This development surely places Priyadarshan among the more popular of southern film directors whose works were critically and commercially appreciated in Hindi cinema, in the league of his peers Ram Gopal Varma and Mani Ratnam.
