Visfot: A Film Made On A Bad Day, And For A Bad Day

EVERYONE in Kookie Gulati’s Visfot is having a bad day. There is a reformed criminal who wants to lead a trouble-free life but meets an old friend on the day when the latter gets followed by cops and he leaves behind a jacket full of drugs. There is a pilot who wakes up thinking he will be late to the airport and by afternoon he catches his wife cheating on him — by evening his son is kidnapped. There is his son who creates a ruckus for leaving behind a plastic lion for his science project and by evening he sits with a gun pointed at his head. There is a girl who gets embroiled in this mess because she happens to be a waitress at the cafe where a lot of this happened (ironically her name is Lucky). And then there is Sheeba Chaddha, a 52-year-old actor playing mother to Fardeen Khan, a 50-year-old man.

This, of course, is putting things mildly. Visfot is a film made on a bad day and for a bad day. A stinking green aesthetic covers its every frame, the background score is always amped up, and all we can see is construction on the Mumbai road. Regular scenes are shot with a peculiar sense of foreboding like a dead body hides in every corner. None of these really add up but then again Sanjay Gupta is one of the producers, a detail which makes sense given Visfot unfolds as a Sanjay Gupta Lite film.

Shoaib Khan (Fardeen Khan) lives in Dongri with his mother (Sheeba Chaddha). His girlfriend Lucky (Krystle D'Souza) works at a cafe. After his friend leaves a jacket with drugs in it and he keeps it in his house to meet Lucky, his room gets on fire. His mother, grieving over her husband’s death, hardly remembers anything. Things escalate soon as Shoaib’s drug-addicted friend threatens to kill him and his family if the jacket is not recovered. This is juxtaposed with another plotline where Akash Shelar (Riteish Deshmukh), an affluent pilot finds out his wife (Priya Bapat) is cheating on him and in the bid to catch her red-handed, his son gets mistakenly kidnapped by Shoaib and co. To repeat: it is a bad day for everyone involved.

Written by Abbas Dalal and Hussain Dalal, Visfot unravels with as little tension as such a premise can conjure but the makers believe the opposite. Every aspect of the filmmaking is informed by the delusion of the makers. Shots go on forever, characters are framed in tight shots even as the story brings in multiple characters (Seema Biswas makes an appearance as the dreaded mafia queen) and they move in and out of the frame with surprisingly little purpose.

By the time the film moves to the third, Visfot stops pretending to be serious. Characters blindly shoot each other, Fardeen Khan stops trying entirely, Sheeba Chaddha makes an early exit, and Riteish Deshmukh looks stunned to be part of this in the first place. It is quite obviously a mess and it gets worse with every minute. In one scene, the character tells another, “I can’t believe this” and pat comes the reply, “I can’t believe you exist”. The incredulity of the exchange perfectly encapsulated my feelings towards the film so lifeless that no amount of deafening background music could evoke interest. This also brings me to the other person in Visfot who is having a bad day: the one watching it – me.

Visfot is currently streaming on Jio Cinema.