Angrezi Medium seems to need an excuse for its existence. Putting the ailing Irrfan back on the screen could be one of them. Until the gif...
Angrezi Medium seems to need an excuse for its existence. Putting the ailing Irrfan back on the screen could be one of them. Until the gifted actor gets completely back in the game, it will have to do.
Irrfan’s first release since he was diagnosed with a neuroendrocine tumour in 2018 is a spiritual sequel to Saket Chaudhary’s 2017 hit Hindi Medium. The new film shares Hindi Medium’s rumbustious comic tone, celebration of self-belief and aspiration, and muddled approach. In Hindi Medium, a couple move neighbourhoods and then heaven and earth to get their daughter admitted to a private English-language school, only to realise that the government-operated institution in which she previously studied was just fine.
Angrezi Medium hops continents. A teenager from Udaipur has her bespectacled eyes set on a prestigious college in London, and her widowed father morphs into a contortionist to make her dream comes true.
Champak (Irrfan) does advise Tarika (Radhika Madan) to try other colleges in India itself, but Tarika is unyielding. (She isn’t the only one in a movie packed with exemplars of obduracy.) Tarika has been dreaming of The Foreign since she was a child. Since the movie is as indulgent of her wishes as her widowed father is, we get, among others, a short...
