REVIEW: Ringa Ringa (2010)

Ringa Ringa: A Riveting Thriller!

February 24, 2010 (Sampurn Wire): Sanjay Jadhav is one of the more technically polished cinematographer-directors in the Marathi film industry. His first film as a director, ‘Checkmate’, showed his competence. Now, with his second film, ‘Ringa Ringa’, it is quite evident that we have a master of the suspense genre in Sanjay.

Producer Kanchan Satpute’s (Bokya Satbande) ‘Ringa Ringa’ is an excellent edge-of-the seat thriller.

The film is set in Goa with a political background with Rangrao (Ajinkya Dev) all set to become the Goa CM in spite of a nexus with terrorists. But his security chief played by Bharat Jadhav (in a total macho makeover) spills the beans of Rangrao to the Party chief (Uday Sabnis) and he gets assigned the task of getting the evidence against Rangrao given by a small time goon Anthony who is bumped off by Rangrao’s hitman (Santosh Juvekar).

The files and the tapes and the photos of Rangrao are with an inspector (Kamlesh Sawant) who turns dirty on Rangrao’s ‘odd job man’ (Ankush Chowdhary) offer of money.

A trade is agreed and Rangrao hands over the money to the inspector but then Rangrao’s hitman kills the inspector too.

Now the files and the tapes are with Bharat who runs away from the crime scene and calls his beautiful wife (Sonali Kulkarni looking ravishing) and when the goons are after Bharat, he calls his wife to the bus stand but is chased by the hitman so he hides the evidence in a safe place but gets killed in the process and dies in his wife’s arms and tells her about the evidence and the whole story of crime.

Thus begins a cat and mouse chase between Sonali and Rangrao and his henchmen which end up with Sonali in a mental asylum along with her aged father (Jayant Savarakar).

But there is a twist in the tale but that would be letting the cat out of the bag.

The film is a paced-up thriller and the director Jadhav seems to be influenced by Hitchcock (Gaslight), Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), Sergio Leone (all his spaghetti westerns-especially the liberal use of nursery rhymes) and other classic thrillers like ‘To Chase a Crooked Shadow’ and ‘No Way Out’.

But the final product is watch-able, with slick frames and music (Ajay-Atul) with a good beat like the ‘Bai Ga Bai Ga’ (Kunal Ganjawala) song choreographed well in a carnival like atmosphere. The screenplay and dialogues by Amol Shetge deserve praise.

The editor Amit Pawar has done a wonderful job with fast-inter-cutting of frames especially the sepia toned sequences. The performances are exemplary by the entire cast. Sonali Kulkarni delivers a career best performance and is likely to win all major awards this year.

Bharat Jadhav has a never-seen-before role and does well.

Santosh Juvekar and Ankush Chowdhary are good but their characterization could have been better. Ajinkya Dev in a negative role sets the screen on fire. Sanjay Mone’s cameo as Dr.Shanbhag leaves a mark. Uday Sabnis, Jayant Savarkar lend good support. Aditi Govitrikar lends oomph to the film. The actor playing the nurse in the psychiatric ward is highly impressive.

See this film for some exciting thrills and wonderful performances!

-Sandeep Hattangadi/ Sampurn Wire