
Jagga Jasoos movie review: Ranbir Kapoor in a still from the film (Image courtesy: YouTube)
Cast: Ranbir Kapoor, Katrina Kaif, Saswata Chatterjee, Sayani Gupta
Director: Anurag Basu
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Some children are born romantic. By this I mean not a desire to canoodle but the intense need to believe - in secrets, in adventures, in the inexplicable. To believe, most importantly, in stories. Jagga, a bespectacled knee-high stammerer, is just such a child. Raised on a diet of Sherlock, Hitchcock, Feluda, Louis Armstrong and Charlie Chaplin - names pointed to him via couriered videotape from a mysterious travelling father - he is a boy with a knack for seeing the wood before he examines the trees. An observant schoolchild fond of spotting bends in the narrative, he reunites old men with long-forgotten tabletop graffiti and solves murder cases mistakenly termed suicide.

Ranbir Kapoor and Katrina Kaif in Jagga Jasoos (Courtesy: jaggajasoos)
This is fine advice, for Basu's film is not only intricately written and plotted, but filled with clever visual flourishes and details, some of which are clues and some of which are magical - and several, like the elephant turning a tiny, twisty street up a hill, are a bit of both. This is a dazzling, inventive and deliciously fun film, a musical mystery fable that curious children (of all ages) should watch at the soonest. This is, for want of comparison, Tintin by way of Amélie.
It begins in West Bengal in 1995 - with the real-life Purulia Arms Drop - but it is a highly ambitious bedazzlement, and frequently changes its setting from Manipur to Calcutta to the utterly fictional (or perhaps all too real) Satyajit Ray city of Shundi, with characters flying over a vintage map, outsized names and all, in an old-school biplane. It is also a musical, finding pretexts in the fact that the stammering sleuth must sing in order to speak, and in the fact that we are being told Jagga's exploits via a narration of his children's books - and the best adventures always rhyme.
Smooth of cheek and wide-eyed with guilelessness, Ranbir Kapoor's Jagga is a hero to love. Like Hergé's Tintin or Nonte (from Narayan Debnath's Nonte-Phonte), Jagga has a tuft of hair sticking out from one side, as if he'd been wearing a hat at a jaunty angle for too long, or stuck his head from a moving locomotive. He's looking for his long-lost father (the videotapes have stopped arriving in the mail) and found, instead, a girl who appears as much of a klutzy jinx as his broken-down dad. The one time he loses his cool is when she burns down his favourite books, and it soon dawns upon him that she's as much of a catastrophe as his father, Bad-Luck Bagchi. He tests his theory by putting several ketchup bottles on her table; she unfailingly squeezes the one with the broken top. She's the one.
This girl, who he hopes may fail in his father's footsteps, is Shruti Sengupta, a high-strung journalist played by Katrina Kaif who looks lovely but lets the songs down, the vocals never quite matching her spoken accent and vice versa. We are, alas, not confident enough to let our actors on that much of a limb. Bagchi, the father - the finest, most endearing character in the film - is played by Saswata Chatterjee in swashbuckling fashion, while Saurabh Shukla chases after him with reliably amusing doggedness. Rajatava Dutta plays a befuddled policeman, and has a priceless gag involving multiple telephones.
This is an impossible role and Kapoor wings it well. Convincingly deciphering clues, desperately beatboxing in order to give himself a beat to say something vital, catapulting pumpkins across a desert... he's all in. An actor with no half-measures, he's created a plucky, heroic character worth celebrating. Basu has always been a storyteller with excellent imagery, but the way he has embraced the madcap is something else. The detailing is a thing of beauty. I find myself wishing there were Jagga Jasoos storybooks out there, and I hope we get the sequel this film deserves. If you ever find yourself making recommendations for a potentially romantic child, you'd do well to put this Anurag Basu film on that list.