Ujda Chaman is a remake of 
the Kannada film 'Ondu Motteya Kathe'.
Which means 'story of an egghead'.
Hair is only dead cells but so much of our
identity and vanity stems from it.
In 'Ondu Motteya Kathe', director Raj B. Shetty,
who also plays the lead,
captures the comedy 
and tragedy of being bald.
One of my favorite bits is a fabulously 
choreographed dream sequence
in which women declare that they prefer 
loneliness over a hairless partner.
Gently and affectionately, the film persuades
us to stop judging people by their looks.
Debutant director Abhishek Pathak takes this
story from Mangalore to Delhi.
Ujda Chaman is set in a middle-class 
Punjabi home in Rajouri Gardens.
In the original, Janardhan teaches Kannada. 
Chaman Kohli is a Hindi professor.
He’s only 30, 
but most of his hair is gone.
Chaman has spent the last five years 
trying to get married,
but no girl can get past his barren head.
The family jyotish declares that 
if Chaman doesn’t get married by 31,
he will remain a bachelor.
Which propels Chaman to go into overdrive.
His attempts at finding a mate include
– and I’m not kidding
– dating a 20-year-old, 
first-year college student.
At one point, he’s checking out 
his housemaid’s cleavage.
Abhishek and writer Danish J Singh who did
the adapted dialogue and screenplay,
design this as a joke.
But honestly, it’s not funny.
Chaman’s behavior is creepy and gross.
He indiscriminately tries to date his colleagues
and then finally gets on Tinder.
Ujda Chaman is about 
the ache of being ordinary.
Sunny Singh, who plays Chaman, does 
an adequate job of being a wallflower
but the script isn’t sharp enough 
to make a wallflower interesting.
Chaman has the personality of a doorknob.
In the original, Janardhan has 
this grand passion for Kannada.
There’s a wonderful scene in which he writes
a love letter with such complicated words
that his confidante and advisor, 
the college peon,
suggests he sends 
a dictionary along with it.
But Chaman seems to have no life
except his baldness 
and his raging hormones.
He’s a moping, crashing bore.
Honestly, even with a head full of hair, 
I doubt any girl would find him attractive.
And Abhishek and Danish examine 
his insecurities at a superficial level.
We see him gaze longingly 
at people with hair,
but it doesn’t get 
much deeper than that.
The responsibility for keeping us interested
then falls on Chaman’s family
who are the stereotypical 
middle-class, over-excited Punjabis.
The characters are wafer thin, 
but they brighten up the screen,
specially Grusha Kapoor as Chaman’s mother.
She’s lovely as she tries to explain why
Punjabi ladkiyan should be hale and hearty.
The other bright spark is Maanvi Gagroo 
who plays Apsara,
the overweight girl Chaman 
meets on Tinder.
She has spunk.
The film fleetingly touches on the Delhi class
divides and DOP Sudhir K. Chaudhary
captures the slice of middle-class localities 
that we’ve seen in films like Do Dooni Chaar
and Band Baaja Baaraat.
But the writing is too thin to adequately
root the narrative in the city.
Though we do get some 
nicely lit shots of Delhi at night.
The biggest problem with Ujda Chaman is that
the film wants to have it both ways.
First make you laugh with cheesy jokes about sex
and virginity
and then deliver an important social message about 
why we shouldn’t judge people by their looks.
But by the time this message arrives, we can
barely listen because we’ve been beaten
senseless by the lackluster plot and the bizarrely
loud and intrusive background score.
It’s too late to be woke 
– literally and figuratively.
'Ondu Motteya Kathe' had a sweetness and poignancy
that has been lost in translation.
In one scene, Apsara looks at Chaman and thinks –
you look completely compromised.
That, my friends, is pretty much 
what this film is.
