Cast: Kajol, Tota Roy Chowdhury, Riddhi Sen, Neha Dhupia
Director: Pradeep Sarkar
Bollywood’s male stars seldom go through their midlife crisis: even at the wrong side of 50, they continue to bag all the plum role in the lead!
The flip side is not so rosy for actresses. It will take many more years for Bollywood to figure out how to utilise the 40-plus female actors who still have the sharpened talent and much-needed sparkle to light the screen. It remains wishful thinking!
In Pradeep Sarkar’s Helicopter Eela, the lead is a character named Eela (Kajol), but it’s a wasted opportunity.
An overly obsessive mom who breathes down her son Vivaan’s (Riddhi Sen) neck, Eela takes charge after her husband Arun (Tota Roy Chowdhury) disappears from their lives and Eela’s career as a singer gets aborted prematurely. Giving up her dreams of furthering her promising aspirations, she starts hovering around her son like a helicopter. While Vivaan loves the attention as a child, he begins to lose his cool when she starts mollycoddling him to the extent of having a disorder bordering on paranoia. She even joins college education along with him to keep an eye on him.
Vivaan suffers, and suffocates as the irrational Eela begins to invade his privacy, and goes from one absurd demand to another to ultimately make their once unique closeness suffer an irreparable damage: Vivaan leaves home!
The story of intensive mothering revolving around the child’s needs is sketchy, and the banal interaction is more insipid than the tearjerker saas-bahu sagas on the telly!
