The most important thing about life is living, says one of the characters in the film Chhichhore, the latest offering from Dangal director Nitesh Tiwari. It’s not about winning, it’s about putting in the fight. This is a lesson Anirudh (Sushant Singh Rajput) and his motley crew of hostel mates at an engineering college learn when they try to shed the “loser” tag of their hostel building, H4, by putting up an unlikely fight against Prateik Babbar and his pals from H3 in the college sports championship.
About 20 years later, the friends, who have long become strangers, reunite to support Anirudh and his ex-wife Maya (Shraddha Kapoor) when their teenage son Raghav is going through a crisis.
The plot moves cleverly between then and now to illustrate the similarities and differences between how the “losers” used the hand life dealt them, and how Raghav draws strength from hearing about it all: The silly boys’ hostel pranks and escapades, how Anirudh wooed campus sweetheart Maya (one of the few girls on campus), and how the boys tricked their opponents and battled their own personal demons to fight for what they wanted.
It is in these flashbacks that the film is at its best — a sweet, nostalgic story of fun, friendship, young love and a bunch of Davids fighting the university equivalent of Goliath.
Director Tiwari really gets the engineering college hostel life, given his own time at IIT-Bombay, be it the sexually loaded ragging or the nicknames that stick for life. So there’s the porn-obsessed Sexa (Varun Sharma), naïve Mummy (Tushar Pandey), potty-mouthed Acid (Naveen Polishetty), bitter Derek (Tahir Raj Bhasin) and sweet, perpetually drunk Bevda (Saharsh Shukla) — and regular guy-next-door Ani, who becomes the glue that holds the team together during the two-month tournament.
The supporting cast steals the show
In the present day, and especially in the second half, the film becomes maudlin and excessively loud, with forgettable music telling us how to feel and speeches about how to be better parents.
Rajput does a decent job as the anguished father; Kapoor has little to do in the past or present, and does it with equally little expression. But it is the supporting cast that gives the film its most fun bits, guaranteed to make you smile. It is also refreshing to see divorce not treated as some kind of evil, instead introduced without any fanfare, and to see a father given custody.
These are things that allow one to overlook the flaws and holes in the film, such as the ease with which problems are overcome and the total lack of logic — why does a state-level basketball and football player have no idea that his college has a major two-month sports tournament, and why is there literally no scene, except a few seconds of song, of the gang actually attending a class?
Ultimately, though, Chhichhore works because it’s fun, fast-paced and sweet, and has a message for all of us, whether we’re students trying to get in the rat race or adults trying to stay in it.
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