Bus Stop Review: Plainly Pointless!

• Review : Bus Stop (2017)
• Producer : Shreyash Jadhav, Mrs.Poonam Shende, Mr. Gajendra Patil, Mr.Asso Nihlani
• Director : Sameer Hemant Joshi
• Star Cast : Amruta Khanwilkar, Aniket Vishwasrao, Hemant Dhome, Siddharth Chandekar, Pooja Sawant, Rasika Sunil, Akshay Waghmare, Madhura Deshpande
• Story : Sameer Hemant Joshi
• Screenplay & Dialogue : Shanta gokhale
• Music : Saurabh, Jasraj and Hrushikesh
• Review By : Abhay Salvi

Rating : 1/5

Bus Stop Marathi Movie Review :

How do I put this? There are certain films that are simply pointless. They are not even irritatingly bad. You just can’t enjoy such films in any possible way. This multi-starrer mishap belongs to that category of films. A few months back we had another ‘disaster’ in the college romance genre ‘F.U.’ while F.U. was equally bad it was also ambitiously ridiculous, so ridiculous that you might end up enjoying the nonsense it keeps hitting you with. In case of ‘Bus Stop’ you are simply bored.

There is factually no conflict to the story! Rather there is no story, just a bunch of overgrown college students fooling around the campus. Maharashtra’s most loved writer/performer Pu La Deshpande once said when older people make movies about the youth they end up making miserable movies. The same is the case with ‘Bus Stop’, the writing has no real understanding of what today’s youth are really about. But forget that the film doesn’t even manage to put together whatever it thinks it knows, even though what it knows is nothing!

It’s such a pity to watch actors like Siddharth Chandekar, Aniket Vishwasrao, Amruta Khanwilkar, Pooja Sawant, Sanjay Mone, Avinash Narkar, Vidyadhar Joshi & Sharad Ponkshe being wasted. Especially Siddharth’s performance, he almost portrays his disinterest of doing this film. Uday Tikekar & Hemant Dhome play characters which they’ve been playing for a long time now, they are a fine example of typecasting in Marathi.

Many a times we feel the makers just stumbled upon the title ‘Bus Stop’ & then to justify it shifted few scenes at a ‘Bus Stop’. But one thing’s for sure the trailer did suggest us that the parents will have a perspective in this film. And they do! Vidyadhar Joshi’s character who plays father to Pooja Sawant is probably the only interesting character. His confusion of whether to give his child utmost freedom or whether to curb it like his friends, could’ve been evolved. But the film almost restlessly makes him a caricaturish filmy father!

Since the film doesn’t work on the most basic stage of having a plot, conflict. The casting mistakes are actually secondary. But in general Marathi cinema needs to understand that we are unlike Bollywood! Bollywood can afford to cast older ‘stars’ in younger roles, because the point is they are ‘stars’. We don’t really have stars! We have actors. And secondly Marathi cinema has been manufacturing teenage films for a while now, in which actual teenagers play teenage characters. Hence the audiences too are not used to watching older actors in younger roles.

We didn’t really notice but technically the film is definitely decent, but then it doesn’t change anything. Among the actors as said above Siddharth looks completely disinterested, the same is the case with Aniket Vishwasrao to some extent. Hemant Dhome’s caricaturish funny guy fails terribly. His relationship with Sharad Ponkshe (his father who owns a Vada Pav shop) could’ve been funnier had it been developed in a better way. Among the girls Amruta Khanwilkar & Pooja Sawant do their bit in whatever scope their parts provide them.

The songs too are forgettable or plain boring just as the film. One of the songs is a clear rip-off of ‘Ratta Maar’ song from Karan Johar’s ‘The Student of the Year’. During the runtime of this film I genuinely wished, why can’t these makers randomly select a foreign college movie & blindfoldedly make a copy of it! But then I feel even that isn’t an easy

Overall:

‘Bus Stop’ supposedly had the ‘youth’ as their target audience. But if you dared to watch this film, I assure you, you’ll feel like a ‘Target’ on which this film is all set to make its ‘Target Practise’.