Chance Pe Dance

Yet another simplistic movie about the red carpet dreams of a starry eyed traveller to tinsel town.

It’s a lemon. The movie is about a wannabe in Mumbai whose life revolves around auditions, part-time jobs, raising money for rent, more auditions. He’s a divine dancer but the big break never comes, and three years down the line, Sameer (Shahid Kapur) gets that sinking feeling. The stars are still high in the sky, but at best he’s going to hit the tree tops.

The scenario is set and we pause at the junction. Which way is Chance Pe Dance headed? Are we going to tinsel town and dream the impossible dream or wake up to the brutal reality of a struggler in Mumbai? Director Ken Ghosh wants it both ways, and so, Sameer is evicted from home and sleeps in his little car, eats vada pav for breakfast and uses loos he can sneak into. But the pretty choreographer (Genelia D’Souza) still loves him and the big break is just round the corner. It’s an uneasy mix of fantasy and reality and what suffers majorly is plausibility.

Be that as it may, what is unforgivable in the script is the cruel trick it plays on an exceptionally cute bunch of kids. What happens is that when Sameer parks his car near a school, he gets a job as a dance teacher for a class of no-hopers. They adore him and he actually teaches them some good moves on the floor. As the bonds grow and an inter-school dance competition looms large, it seems the movie is finally on track with a workable narrative.

However, quicker than you can say ‘dirty dancing’, the children are side-tracked to make way for Sameer’s staircase to heaven. He makes it on the red carpet and the movie lurches towards one of the most inexplicable and incomplete endings in recent Hindi cinema.

It is unfortunate that as a tale of a young and starry-eyed traveller on Mumbai’s seedy and tortuous lane to moviedom, Chance Pe Dance instantly draws unfavourable comparison with Zoya Akhtar’s Luck By Chance. Ghosh’s film is literal, simplistic and without irony.

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Ajit Duara