Jeevan Ya Bheema Yojana con???, Review: fART for fART’s Sake
Jeevan Ya Bheema Yojana con???, Review: fART for fART’s Sake
Ever since art became a public exercise, were artistes create a piece of art, audio or visual or audio-visual, the debate has been raging whether art should have a purpose or a message, or, it can have neither, and still be art. The latter kind of art is an expression of the artiste’s feelings and consciousness. Modern art or abstract art falls in the latter category. Such art is also called art for art’s sake. It is not affected by public acceptance or rejection, reviews and criticism. Watching Jeevan (Life) Ya (or) Bheema (Insurance, with an h added after B) Yojana (Plan) con???, which is a play upon words used for Life Insurance Plan, as they are spelt in Hindi, one should consider including it in the latter category.
Often the BUTT of all jokes, farting is not funny at all. Medically, it is called flatulence. It cannot be completely "cured" because it is a healthy function, excessive gas can be successfully managed or treated, but not stopped. Farting happens when gas builds up in your digestive system and needs to escape. The main sources of this gas are:
Swallowed air: Entering the body when you chew gum, smoke, use a straw, or eat too fast.
Bacterial fermentation: Occurs when helpful bacteria in your large intestine break down foods that your body struggles to digest fully.
Gas-producing foods: Beans, lentils, broccoli, dairy, and whole grains contain complex carbohydrates that create more gas.
Medical conditions: Issues like Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Celiac disease, or Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO) can cause excessive or painful gas.
However, ignoramuses equate flatulence with constipation, and only constipation, condemning or berating the person who farts, as one who is avoiding or delaying the passing of a motion, and deliberately subjecting them to foul smells.
Jeevan Ya Bheema Yojana con??? should be suspended from cinemas, and the makers should be subjected to a crash course in the condition that could be the result of extreme uneasiness and pain for the person who emits gas from his posterior, and then direct them to cut the portions where it is repeated, as an unending joke, in the film. But that would not help, because they would have to delete a large part of the film. As it is, the film was released yesterday, and a lot of damage is already done. Watching it at a press preview day-before yesterday, 03 September 2026, it made me cringe. How low can you go? It is not a fart that stinks. It is the film that pollutes the air in the theatre. But apart from the fart, let us see what it has to offer in terms of cinematic quality.
One has often heard of men willing to die so that their debt-ridden families can get their life insurance money. But is also a fact that if somebody commits suicide, his life insurance policy becomes invalid. But what if you are a couple, named Jeevan and Yojana, in debt of an amount of Rs. 2 crore (2,00,000,00), and have no money to pay even their monthly rent, and opportunity knocks at your door? Jeevan’s restaurant, which opened just before the onset of Corona Virus Covid, has failed, and he has lost all his money. He has to avoid creditors, and uses different routes to come and go from his home, lest he be spotted and caught. The two have already moved from Mumbai to Pune, to get out of reach of ruthless money-lenders, including a bank. They survive on Yojana’s meagre salary as a nurse. And then, one day, he spots somebody who is a doppelganger, a complete lookalike, but for the ear-rings and spectacles he wears. Slowly, but surely, a plan build-up in his brain.
Jeevan follows this man, to learn more about him. He finds that this man, named Bheema, is a good-for-nothing alcoholic, and is drinking himself to death. He lives alone, in a shanty, and appears to have no job and does no constructive work. A chimerical plan takes shape in his mind: What if Bheema were to die? What if he could pass off Bheema’s body as his own? And What if his wife could get the insurance claim? Destiny is on his side, and Bheema does, indeed die. Jeevan manages to bring his corpse home. Yojana is already into the plan. The two then fake Jeevan’s death and arrange for the last rites of Bheema. Yojana accompanies Jeevan to the cremation ground, where hi body is covered with wooden planks, with sandalwood and ghee applied over it, and the body is burnt. But not before a suspicious character in dark glasses and a black dress appears from nowhere, and takes a good look at the body.
Cremation done, Yojana goes back home, turning down an invitation from her aunt to spend some time with her at the aunt’s place. Jeevan is waiting, expectantly. Yojana tells him that all went according to plan, and the two decide that Jeevan should go in hiding, while she calls the insurance agent to the house, to stake her claim. But three characters come to visit Yojana. They including her landlady, the man in the dark glasses, who is preceded by his henchman, and an insurance claim investigator. Yojana manages to stave off the house-owner, but the two others, Vinayak and his odd-job man, happen to be from the underworld, running a diamond smuggling racket. Vinayak claims that Bheema was his delivery-man, and had decamped with diamonds worth Rs. 5 crore. Now, he wants the diamonds back, at gun-point. He is also unwilling to believe that Bheema is dead, suggesting, instead, that Jeevan is Bheema in disguise, and the man Yojana cremated earlier in the day was Jeevan, not Bheema.
This germ of an idea has good prospects of developing into a taut crime thriller, interspersed with black comedy. However, M/s Mukta Bhatt, Abhishek Dogra and Vivek Verma end–up leading viewers on a wild gooses chase, with red herrings dropped every five minutes. Visually, the script reads like stage play, with the few outdoor scenes pushed in, to justify the film format. The first person to ring the bell is their landlord lady, a slim girl, below 25, in skimpy clothes. This is their land-lady, Yashica, who comes to collect the 3 months’ overdue rent, not caring for the fact that Yojana has just come home after cremating her husband. The next man to knock at their door is a short, bespectacled man, probably in his mid-50s, who claims to be Jeevan’s friend and says that he often dropped Jeevan home. The henchman and the tall smuggler follow, along with the insurance agent, whom Yojana has already called. These entries are very theatrical, and standard drama tropes.
The henchman is written as a character who keeps giving healthy diet tips to Yojana, about imbibing ayurvedic ingredients in various forms, including adding them to tea. By contrast, he himself suffers from extreme flatulence, and keeps breaking foul-smelling wind at regular intervals. Moreover, he talks in a rapid-fire, highly slurred speech. Why would a smuggling Don keep him in his retinue? Then, guns are pulled out, first by Vinayak and then by Yojana. She finds a gun in a drawer, and asks how it got there? He says it was bought to protect the family from violent claim agents. Isn’t that going too far for a middle level couple, who have sunk into the lower middleclass. Odd-job man’s frequent farting interrupts all proceedings. First, the two men get the better of the couple, while the tables are turned later, with both of them tied to chairs, and Yojana wielding the gun. The insurance man, who is a plump Maharashtrian, named Sachin Agarkar, asks just two questions of Yojana, while Jeevan is in hiding: What was the dead man’s name and how did he die? That must be some claim agent! She tells him to refer to the police report and the death certificate, and he leaves. But he comes back later, because he has forgotten his diary. Yojana does not let him enter the home. While turning to go away, he notices a bullet mark on his diary, and gets suspicious. He heads for the police station, and reports the matter to Inspector Ajit Tendulkar. The two have a good laugh over their names, since they represent interchanged names of cricketers, Sachin Tendulkar and Ajit Agarkar. Normally, one would expect him to head to his office and report to his Manager, and the Manager would take a call. One good twist relates to how the henchman gets hold of a large piece of broken glass, which will help him untie his boss. There are indeed 2-3 more good twists in the tale, which I am not revealing, because in a suspense-crime-black comedy, these would be classified as spoilers. But the gaping holes in the narrative negate them. Many of those twists are never explained.
Since this is a film, not a play, Abhishek Dogra, the director gets to include a few outdoor shots. In fact, the film opens with protracted funeral rites and a cremation. Then there are the rickshaw rides and a rickshaw chase, also the roads on which cars speed by, as Bheema tries to cross the road, and the exterior of the house, with a police jeep parked outside. Trying to elicit laughs, the living room of the couple has a rickety old, crawling fan, which the fartner estimates to be 150 years old. Flashbacks are nicely used. Repeated phone calls from the Don’s ferocious wife, for him to come back home immediately, fail to evoke any laughter. Jeevan, and his lookalike Bheema, are well ideated and enacted. A back-story of Bheema would have helped the audience take some interest in the character. As it is, he is portrayed as a uni-dimensional person. If this had been a debut film, one would have some empathy for the director, but it is not. In fact, it is his fourth film in 11 years, one of which starred Govinda. His debut was an entertaining one, with Dolly Ki Doli (2015), about a con-woman. The con part has stayed with him, finding its way into the title of this film, since the subject is an attempt by a couple to con their insurance company.
Compared to his size in Munnabhai, Arshad Warsi has probably doubled in size. Add to that the fact that he is in a double role here, and you have four Arshads. As Jeevan, his role is as far removed from Circuit as the Cayambe Volcano (Ecuador) and Gunung Kerinci (Sumatra, Indonesia, a distance of 20,040 kilometres apart, the two points most separated on the earth. Warsi is, nevertheless, a dependable actor. He does the least bit of over-acting in this theatrical film, followed by Vijay Raaz as Vinayak. Sanjeeda Shaikh lives up to her first name, Sanjeeda, meaning serious. She is slim and svelte, and has a great complexion. As the totally-at-sea Yojana, who finds the proceedings getting more and more muddled and complex by the minute, she does well in holding her own. Vijay Raaz is the quintessential Vijay Raaz, given a Haryanvi accent, which is nothing new, and remaining poker-faced throughout. Brijendra Kala is the source of the foul smell, which continues to enter the air frequently. His slurring speech, which is natural, not dictated by the character’s requirements, is always a big handicap, and a lot of funny dialogue goes by un-deciphered. Going back, he is a sort of Mukri, the fat comedian of the 50s, 60s and 70s. As soon Mukri would enter any frame, the audience would start giggling, even before he said a word.
Pooja Chopra as the landlady is a surprise choice, as are her wardrobe, and her amorous advances towards Jeevan, merely to make Yojana jealous. Never mind, because she takes it all in her stride, and is quite comfortable when there are references to sex and intimacy. Not quite land-ladylike, I daresay. Late Atul Parchure, a native Marathi speaker, is well cast as the insurance claim investigator, who is a bit dumb initially, but gets into his act as the story develops. Good support comes from Madhu Anand Chandhock as Yojana’s aunt, Late Jaywant Wadkar, in his last Hindustani film role, as the Inspector, Raj Parmar and Dimple Srivastava.
Jayant Kurup, as the DOP, performs some clever tricks with the camera. One thing appears grammatically incorrect: a rickshaw moves from left of camera to the right, and in a later shot, it enters the frame from the right, heading towards the left. In a fast-moving narrative, the some of the scenes, especially the heated conversations between Jeevan and Yojana, drag on. Editors Amit Joshi and Soumyojyoti Sur should have shrunk them a bit.
Ending on a note that crime does pay, granted the divine intervention, Jeevan Ya Bheema Yojana con??? is the kind of film where you have a few good chuckles, but emerge from the theatre, feeling a bit conned by the screenplay and the direction. It hurts, when you find a very interesting storyline being let down by tacky screenplay and unimaginative direction.
Rating: **
Trailer: https://youtu.be/fAvteKSSHvw
