The Wonder Years

CAST: Sohail Lakhani,Delzad Hiravali,Apoorva Arora ,Suraj Singh,Sachin Khedekar,Tanvi Azmi

Rating: ***

With children as the principal cast,the hardest thing is to get the tone right. Bollywood veers usually,and distressingly,between cautionary and cutesy,and is only now learning to tread a new path. Bubble Gum gets it to the rights,with its life-like portrayal of a couple of small-town teenage brothers experiencing the first stirrings of young adulthood.

There are several nice things about the film. The let-the-kids-be-kids tenet is adhered to strictly: adults come in only when they need to. Vedant (Lakhani) is an excitable 14-year-old,who is dealing,not very well,with the twin pressures of having a challenged older brother Vidur (Hiravali),and the aches and pains that first love brings. Jenny (Arora) is the girl-next-door,and Vedant is well and truly smitten,but he’s not the only contender. Bad boy Ratan (Singh) is a worthy rival,keeping a lusty eye on both Ved’s girl and Vidur’s stamp collection,as the gang looks on.

To have urban kids hanging out in middle-class colony compounds minus gizmos is a near impossibility these days. But this film is set in the prehistoric,pre-Internet,pre-cellphone 1980s,when acquiring a shiny new bicycle held out the same happiness as an Xbox does today. The location is Jamshedpur (the second time it’s featured big in the last couple of years,after Udaan),so you get a mélange of accents (Bihari,Bengali,and in between),not overdone,hurray. The characters look as if they belong to those houses,and live that life. Everyone in town knows everyone else,the fathers of pretty girls have to be prostrated before,summer afternoons have to be spent playing kabaddi (the only way you can legitimately hold a girl’s hand),and festivals are a merry,communal affair: the director clearly knows his ground and serves nostalgia well-done,without mawkishness.

Getting a speech- or hearing-impaired act to look natural,and steering clear of turning it into an exaggerated mime or milking it for pathos,is another toughie. Hiravali,who in real life is challenged,makes it refreshingly matter-of-fact,as just something he lives with.

Lakhani,who plays the younger brother,also makes you smile,with his irritation at constant parental attention to the older one,his refusal to cut his hero-like long curls,his display of the love and irritation that is the outcome of being a sibling,and the all-consuming passion for a pretty girl.

Vedant is the youngster you may have been,when you were 14. Khedekar and Azmi make good parents — even if they use the word “handicapped”— of two boys with different needs,trying to keep both happy.

Bubble Gum suffers from some amount of narrative drabness,and some strange too-quick transitions. But it is a film that needs to be noted for its appealing cast and being true to itself.

shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com