Comedy
SATRU GATE
CAST: Madan Krishna Shrestha, Hari Bansha Acharya, Deepak Raj Giri, Deepa Shree Niraula, Paul Shah, Anchal Sharma, Priyanka Karki
DIRECTION: Pradip Bhattarai
Next-door neighbors Suraj (Paul Shah) and Sandhya (Anchal Sharma) are lovers and are destined to get hitched soon. The two families are preparing for the wedding but Suraj’s father (Hari Bansha Acharya) is still apprehensive about getting his son married to the daughter of his sworn enemy, a corrupt politician played by Ramesh Ranjan. He tries to reason with his wife (Deepashree Niraula) and son to back out. But what is a loving father to do when his son’s adamant to marry the girl of his choice? The opening 15 minutes of ‘Satru Gate’ set it up as a regular ‘slice of life’ centered on a big, fat Nepali wedding. But hang on! Director Pradip Bhattarai and his co-writer Deepak Raj Giri aren’t here to offer you a sober family entertainer. Their aim is rather to stretch the comedy to the extreme and push the story forcefully to a chaotic route. They model their film as a South Indian masala entertainer, piling it with multiple sub-plots driven by illogical twists every 15 minutes or so.
The movie moves at lightning speed. In this family mix, out of nowhere, a tantric baba is thrown in. He demands Suraj and Sandhya’s matrimony be stopped as their alliance will anger the holy spirits. Then a troublemaker Rahul (Deepak Raj Giri) moves into the neighborhood. He happens to be a YouTube vlogger who upsets the neighborhood’s harmony by spying on his neighbors to create sensational content for his YouTube channel.
One of his stunts goes too far, jeopardizing Suraj and Sandhya’s wedding and creating a feud between their families. After that Satru Gate shows no trace of being a wedding movie and ventures into a battle of wits between the characters of Hari Bansha Acharya character and Deepak Raj Giri. A few more eye-roll inducing plot twists later, the film shifts from Kathmandu to Tarai where Sandhya’s made to marry someone else while Suraj and his father decide to crash her wedding to rescue her. But until that point, keeping track of the story becomes a tedious chore.
Heavyweight comedians Acharya and Giri disappoint as they rarely come out of their comfort zone. Acharya does what he does best, playing a clownish man-child. He approaches this role by only slightly twisting his Hari Bahadur character that he has immortalized over the years. Similarly, Giri swaggers back to the cool-dude baddie he played in both installments of ‘Chakka Panja’. The two overshadow the youngsters Paul Shah and Anchal Sharma. It feels like the two are doing extended cameos in a movie that begins with them as protagonists.
This is director Bhattarai’s follow up to 2016’s ‘Jatra’. While he was successful in weaving together three distinct characters to blend a coherent story in ‘Jatra’, he’s weighed down by the massive cast and never-ending sub-plots in Satru Gate. He flips from one scene to another as if he is a guide who wants to give his audience the tour of the entire world in just two hours. This is mentally draining on the audience.
Laughs in the movie mostly come from cheap digs at someone’s appearance or misogynistic one-liners. It is ironic that after all the randomness and lapse of logic, the movie wants to ends as a socially aware work celebrating Nepal’s cultural diversity.
Satru Gate was not made with the audience’s intelligence in mind. It was made solely as a vanity project for Hari Bansha Acharya and Deepak Raj Giri to shoehorn their old-school comic sensibilities into a money-spinning masala movie.
2 stars **
