Jolly Days Movie Review

Decent Effort..

Movie Review By Raju Shanbhag

First, a very beautiful and feel good scene for all our readers. In the climax of the film Jolly Days, all the protagonists get job offers from Wipro in their very first interviews. All are freshers and some are very weak in English, Still, in these days of recession, they all get jobs at the very first attempt! This seemed to be the only farfetched and filmy idea about the film Jolly days. Or else, the film is reasonably well made.

I said reasonable, because within its limits, Jolly days beats many of the conventional Gandhinagar rules and that’s worth applauding. Of course, it’s a copy of a Telugu film(Happy Days). We haven’t seen the original, so we will try to evaluate Jolly days on its own merit, and there are many.

To start with, there are no filmy heroes in this film. This means you are spared of Machchu brandishing heroes who kill people at will. There are fights, but they are like normal college gang wars where everyone is vulnerable. There are no emotionally overcooked dialogues that exasperate you to say the least. The emotional scenes are narrated with admirable restraint; and so are the fight sequences.

Jolly Days tracks the college lives of six impressionable youngsters who take admission in an engineering college. There are usual ragging scenes, love at first sights and a hot lady lecture who doesn’t mind exposing her navel to keep the students entertained (it’s her words). Expectedly, every male and female falls in love with each other and the story is about how their love lives develop.

And that’s the biggest drawback of Jolly Days. Although well narrated, the film doesn’t have a single scene that leaves a long impression on you or stay with you for long time. Director M. D Shridhar has done a neat job and shows considerable will power in not falling for the usual Gandhinagar traps. But we honestly feel that something more was needed to make the film more entertaining.

Consider the track, where a junior student falls for the girlfriend of his senior student who rags him. An interesting element indeed; but this is a single minded track and ends exactly in the same way as you can expect it. If only the director had explored some other possibilities. What about the usual darker sides of college life such as drugs, politics, exploitation etc? Nothing of that sort is shown in the film. A model college indeed!

It does not mean that every college story should have a drug addict and rapist in it. But the lack of any seriously dark elements, coupled with neat but unimaginative narration sometimes makes the film a bit of a drag. The film anyway does not have a huge star cast to boast of. So, no gripping narration makes film all that much boring.

Aishwarya Nag is the only old face in the film and she looks beautiful. In acting too, she carries forward her promising performance from Neene Neene. Others such as Spoorti, Niranjan, Vishwas, Praveen and Shriraghav are impressive.

The music by J. Mayor and Krishna Kumar’s photography are among the other highlights of the film.

If you wanna watch Jolly Days, don’t go to theatre with too many expectations. You might actually end up enjoying the film in the end!