Nothing original, but it will leave a smile on your face.
Gurpreet/Gippi (Riya Vij) is a gawky, overweight 14-year-old girl trying to cope with the difficulties of life at school and home. At home, Gippi must deal with the ‘adult situation’ of her parents’ divorce. She must help her mother Pappi (Divya Dutta) come to terms with her ex-husband’s quick second marriage. Gippi has a love-hate relationship with her brother Booboo (Arbaz Kidwani), who appears to be gay.
At school, Gippi is bunched with other losers: Anchal (Doorva Tripathi) is quiet and struggling with her periods, and Ashish (Aditya Deshpande) is a nerd with a winning smile, in love with Gippi. Shamira (Jayati Modi) is The Perfect Girl – a beautiful bully, and Gippi’s arch nemesis.
Where are Gippi’s love interests, you ask? Kabir (Mrinal Chawla), is a shy, ambivalent new guy in class who quickly becomes an uncomfortable part of Shamira’s gang. Arjun (Taaha Shah) is the quintessential bad boy. Good looking, chain-smoking and in high school (therefore older and with beard). Needless to say, Gippi falls for Arjun.
In the ensuing melee, Gippi must face-off against Shamira in the school’s Head Girl election, and this is what drives the plot.
Now I feel I must point out that I was not very excited to watch this film. The promos involved a flurry of 35-second YouTube videos where Alia Bhatt, Varun Dhawan, Sidharth Malhotra, Arjun Kapoor, Parineeti Chopra and Imran Khan individually talk about meeting Gippi, a marketing strategy that needed to have its head examined. The audience is immediately going to compare the film with Student of the Year. I don’t want to be reminded of SOTY (and in this, I am not alone). Gippi is a movie that tells its audience its OK to be who you are; you don’t have to be good-looking or have a perfect body. What better way to market this story than by having 6 good-looking stars with perfect bodies tell us we needn’t be like them?
Moving on, Gippi the movie has its heart at the right place…almost. It lacks novelty in its take on growing up. Teenager comes of age. First love. First period. Angst. Cool types versus loser types. It’s all been done to death. There are glimpses of Mean Girls, Gossip Girl and Awkward.
Borrowing a leaf out of the very slim book that is SOTY, the film portrays the Head Girl election as a shallow event. The girl with a hot body, popularity, good marks and a boyfriend gets to be Head Girl. I’m not sure Sonam Nair was entirely convinced with this portrayal, and there is an effort to redeem this at the end when Shamira goes into a tirade defending her worth (one of the weakest scenes in the film). It’s quite unclear whether she is defending the shallowness of the election, or saying the election isn’t shallow to begin with.
Gippi works only because of its good intentions and honest performances. Most of the cast is good because they’re given decently fleshed-out characters to inhabit. Riya Vij is just the right mix of endearing and crazy, and Divya Dutta is excellent as usual. Their scenes together are a delight to watch. The real scene-stealer is Aditya Deshpande as Ashish, the nerd with a winning smile. He’s simply adorable. The only misfit is Taaha Shah, whose Arjun seems to have stumbled across Gippi’s St. Mary’s erroneously while on his way to SOTY’s St. Teresa College. Can’t really blame him, though – Arjun’s character is paper-thin and far too black to be convincing.
Gippi is a spirited effort with good intentions and good humor, handicapped by its tired, predictable plotting. Though I may not be a fan of the way it tells its story, I quite like the story it wants to tell.
Chasing the Script 