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Looop Lapeta: Taapsee Pannu in the film. (courtesy taapsee)
Cast: Taapsee Pannu, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Shreya Dhanwanthary, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Hani Yadav, Gaurav Pareek, Manik Papneja and Rajendra Chawla
Director: Aakash Bhatia
Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
No matter from where one chooses to begin, a loop is a loop, a globular entity that entraps and enervates. In Looop Lapeta – the loop in the title has three o’s to denote the triptych that constitutes the comic thriller – it also suggests the cycle of life that two down-on-luck lovers want to control, if not wriggle out of.
Given what it is dealing with, Looop Lapeta has a legitimate reason to go round in circles although when the heroine runs – she does so not for her own life but for her trouble-prone boyfriend’s – she is on a course that is more zigzag than circular within each of the three time-loops she has to contend with.
Part wild, wacky and wickedly witty, part flabby, flip and flimsy, this flighty ‘remake’ of a German thriller from a quarter-century ago is a film engaged in a futile search for contemporary relevance. But, then, how many searches in life yield results that can be predicted and moderated?
That is the question that Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998) had posed in 80 taut, whip-smart minutes where every split-second and every swerve counted. Aakash Bhatia’s Looop Lapeta, out on Netflix, also keeps a count of the minutes as they tick away, but it grants itself several detours that take the film across the two-hour mark without adding much abiding value to the original concept.
Yes, every choice that one makes matters. The one aimed at throwing extra sauce into the concoction isn’t particularly salutary. To account for the added runtime, the screenplay (credited to four writers – Vinay Chhawal, Ketan Pedgaonkar, Akash Bhatia and Arnav Vepa Nanduri) also factors in the quandaries of a heartbroken cabbie and his about-to-be-married girlfriend.
Nor is that all. Looop Lapeta also pulls into its fold a Punjabi jeweller who runs a business establishment in the heart of Goa and must deal with two sons who want to rob his store at the point of a fake gun. The boys mask up and devise ways to barge into the shop and make off with the jewels without letting their old man know who they are. Tall order that!
The cabbie’s story is primarily about his girlfriend who dangles between the man she loves and the call centre executive she is about to marry. She must make up her mind quickly because time is fast running out. Her predicament, like that of the two lead characters, conveys the film’s pivotal philosophy: haste isn’t a waste and no experience is useless.
A feckless young man, Satya (Tahir Raj Bhasin), lands in big trouble when he loses a large sum of money that he has to deliver to his mobster-boss Victor (Dibyendu Bhattacharya). He turns to his girlfriend Savi (Taapsee Pannu) for help. Her life, too, is a mess – she has just discovered that she is pregnant without wanting to be – but she is a woman endowed with the ability to think on her feet.
It helps that she is fleet-footed to boot. An athlete whose dreams of being a champion has been stymied by an injury, Savi runs and runs and runs when Satya makes a hash of a simple delivery. Three scenarios play out one after another with different outcomes but the vicissitudes of fate and the choices and decisions that Savi and Satya only aggravate matters.
One strand of the yarn is, of course, centred on the girl’s estranged father, boxing instructor Atul Borkar (K.C. Shankar). In Run Lola Run, the dad was a bank manager who held the key to the money the heroine needed to bail out her boyfriend. Here, he doesn’t work in a bank but is the only person Savi can think of when she hits a dead-end.
Between Satya plotting to evade his boss – who has a turkey in the oven that will take 80 minutes to cook and that’s the time the hero has to find the bag he has lost – and Savi running into her own set of troubles, the tangle gets worse.
Satya crosses paths with the two brothers contemplating a heist; Savi gets embroiled with the cabbie (Sameer Kevin Roy) and his confused beloved (Shreya Dhanvanthary). Mayhem reigns. The rigmarole unleashed in and around the jewellery store by its owner Mamlesh Charan Chaddha (Rajendra Chawla) and the two sons he has unceremoniously disowned, Appu (Manik Papneja) and Gappu (Raghav Raj Kakker), accentuate the film’s absurdity quotient and queer the pitch for the two lovers seeking a way out of the hole that they are in.
The extended length of Looop Lapeta means veering away from the story’s core and embracing other elements that, even as they add elements of mirth, divert attention from the dizzying race against time that the two principal characters must run to save themselves from Victor’s wrath.
Victor runs a casino-restaurant and relishes sanguinary analogies – he refers to a turkey being marinated for the grill or a crab being thrown into boiling water when he talks about the kind of violence that he is capable of perpetrating. He rounds off every threat with a nonchalant “you know what I mean”. Yes, Satya does know all too well.
In Run Lola Run, each of the three scenarios plays out in well-nigh real time – 20 minutes. Looop Lapeta expends nearly 30 minutes on a prelude devoted to detailing the circumstances in which Satya and Savi meet. The latter is her at her tether’s end, the former believes all it takes for life to change is a day.
When that day is upon them, it threatens to change everything for the worse. Satya is on the precipice of a disaster. The mythology of Savitri and Satyavan comes in handy to underline the former’s resolve to save the latter at all cost. A cop chases her; Savitri hollers, Time nahi hai re, baba!” She keeps running. That is where the rub lies – time flies and she must to keep pace because reversing the flow of time is beyond her powers. Or is it?
Taapsee Pannu plunges headlong into the funky whirligig and delivers a performance that holds the film together. Tahir Raj Bhasin plays second fiddle but never fails to hit the right notes. Looop Lapeta is also enlivened by the supporting acts, especially by Manik Papneja and Raghav Raj Kakker.
A throbbing soundscape embellished with intelligently employed songs strengthens the film’s sensory underpinnings.
Looop Lapeta, shot by cinematographer Yash Khanna, necessarily relies overly on artifice to narrate its mind-bending story of a duo in a bind. Splashes of colour, tinted visuals, skewed angles and frequent split screens – horizontal, diagonal, multiple, the works – are pressed into service. Some of it works, some doesn’t. But that is how life is, isn’t it?
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