Gippi
Starring: Riya Vij, Divya Dutta, Taaha Shah, Pankaj Dheer, Raqesh Vashisth
At: DT Cinemas & others
Rated: 7/10
The girl is cute, her family is cute, her friends are cute, the film is cute, dialogues are cute, the Shammi Kapoor numbers are cute and the direction is cute too. Gippi, the pleasantly plump teenager who leads the loser group in her school, is the butt of all unsavoury jokes, keeps falling off chairs, hates to move on the playground, resents all lessons, looks down on boys her age and is the epitome of teeny-bopper blunder, somehow takes your heart.
All the scorn around her barely pulls her down and the way she shakes on Shammi Kapoor numbers, or for that matter, understands the angst of her divorced mother who is forced to attend her ex-husband’s second marriage with a straight face, makes her good currency for a film so centralised on her that there is not one frame without her in the entire film.
Sonam Nair, the debutant director, has done well to catch the pulse of this genre of film. She keeps it souffle light and yet puncy, real and yet dreamy, fun and yet poignant in a subtle kind of way. Gippi warms your heart pretty well but it would have been great if the fun episodes were more than Nayyer unfolds in this one.