Silence Please....The Dressing Room Review

Forget "Lagaan". Cricket and cinema have never gelled. Examples? The Kumar Gaurav-starrer "All Rounder" many years ago, and more recently Gaurab Pandey's "Stumped".

Someone else has decided to put out another cricket movie at this time when the India-Pakistan cricket series occupies the public's mind.

The question is would anyone want to be weaned away from the actual game to watch "Silence Please....The Dressing Room" - a film on cricket and that too one that is so clumsily put together that it looks like a television serial?

The zealous screenwriter tries to mix cricket with terrorism. While on one hand we see the Indian cricket team preparing for a goodwill match, on the other hand terrorists plan to disrupt it.

But fear not. There's the intrepid cop, Arif Zakaria, and the fearless reporter Sonali Kulkarni who subvert the subversive forces of militancy. Cricket and nationalism survive. Wish we could say the same about the aesthetics of cinema.

Funnily enough, the terrorism angle in the pickled plot just stutters and stammers to a hasty end, as though the director just lost interest in the fusion of bats and guns.

The amateurish script of "Silence Please...The Dressing Room" treats members of the cricket team like a bunch of squabbling smirking rivalry-ridden jokers.

Maybe there's a lot of backslapping and bitterness in the backrooms. But surely it can't be so juvenile like senior schoolboys on a constant ragging binge.

In one sequence, scribe Sonali barges into the dressing room and shoots photographs of cricketers in their towels. And when she's scolded by the coach (Tom Alter), she giggles as though she has been caught at a male strippers' club.

Maybe the director got caught in the wrong game.

Salil Ankola, who in real life couldn't play because of an injured knee, plays the captain of the Indian team, limping on the field and talking furtively into the cell phone.

No, no, he isn't a match-fixer, just a guy with a lump in his knee waiting for his biopsy.

No lump in our throat about this film though. If you look really hard, the only bright spot is newcomer Alekh Sangal as the youngest and newest recruit of the team whom everyone treats with contempt, before he slams sixers on the field, leading the team to a grand finale.

But who's there to guide this deplorable piece of chaos to the finishing line? Certainly not the director who's caught napping while the whole cast pretends to be having a ball on the field.

"Silence Please....The Dressing Room" is what they loosely and irresponsibly call a "multiplex" film. The only problem is, it doesn't even begin to reach to its target audience.

Did Bernard Shaw really say cricket is a game played by 11 fools and watched by 1,100? He must have foreseen this piece of work!