Movie review of Vicky Donor. It needed a real hard shake! The stiff and obsolete mentality that makes us pooh-pooh the talk of sperm donation, let alone practice it wholeheartedly.
John Abraham’s maiden production Vicky Donor gives this anachronistic mindset a hard shake -- whirr...whirr...whirr -- without flushing any moral lessons down our throat. Rather it does it with tongue-in-cheek humour.
Dr. Baldev Chaddha (Annu Kapoor) runs an infertility clinic in Daryaganj, Delhi, but the business is down for want of a healthy, testosterone-gifted man to donate his sperms for the couples who haven’t been able to conceive. Chaddha is a man who boasts “shakal dekh ke bande ka sperm pehchaan jaata hun” and the banda he zeroes down as the next prospective sperm donor for his clinic is the true blue ‘Aryaputra’: Vicky Arora (Ayushmann Khurrana).
Vicky is an out-of-job youth with nothing on his hands except perhaps helping his mom (Dolly Ahluwalia) with the beauty parlour that she runs from her Lajpat Nagar home. He comes face to face with Chaddha after a brawl in the colony and thereafter begins a partnership between the two. Of course, it takes a lot of pursuing from Chaddha to convince Vicky to donate his sperm, but once the ‘Aryaputra’ is aboard, money rolls in. Vicky’s super-potent sperm ends the drought of infertile couples, but trouble starts when he falls in love with a beautiful bong Ashima (Yami Gautam).
Apart from the Punjabi-Bengali differences that Vicky has to tide over with her, he has to keep his job (sperm donor) a secret under the garb of “export of ‘handi’crafts.”
Directed by Shoojit Sircar, Vicky Donor touches upon a sensitive subject without being glum about it. Rather, the film is littered with some laugh-out-loud situations that ironically, at time, expose the hypocrisy of the middle-class. You see couples coming to Chaddha’s clinic with demands for bespoke sperm that will have their kids become the Aishwarya Rais and Sachin Tendulkars of tomorrow. And there’s also a convincing depiction of a typical Delhi family, strikingly evident in the interactions of Vicky’s mom and her tech-savvy mother-in-law (Kamlesh Gill).
The screenplay by Juhi Chaturvedi abounds with clever moments. The dialogues particularly are finely penned, like when Vicky says “sintex ki tanki mein store karoon!” while talking about, you know what.
Best of all, the performances are topnotch, be it the Punjabi spouting Annu Kapoor or the decidedly confident Ayushmann Khurrana or the pretty Yami Gautam. Dolly Ahluwalia and Kamlesh Gill provide us some mirthful moments.
All in all, Vicky Donor is a spunky comedy that very much deserves a shot!
Rating: ***
Norwegian
