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Indie films are often talked about for the grand issues that they deal with. But Hemant Gaba’s directorial debut Shuttlecock Boys entices with its simplicity. The best part of the film are its characters—the shuttlecock boys—who are surprisingly real in depiction and effortless in their performances.

There is Loveleen (Manish Nawani) who works in a call center and dreams of buying a red Swift car; Manav (Aakar Kaushik), a small time chef from Amritsar who is faced with a shut down-restaurant, Pankaj (Alok Kumar) who has been struggling to clear his Chartered Accountancy exams and Gaurav (Vijay Prateek) who sells credit cards but wants to marry his demanding girlfriend.

They are the regular, middle class boys with no extraordinary ambitions; ubiquitous characters that one comes across every day. They are struck in the grind of life: unfulfilling jobs and unfulfilled expectations of loved ones. What brings them...

This initiative of PVR in releasing small-budget Indie films is getting rather interesting and what began as just another movie show to attend, I’ve now begun looking forward to what the ‘directors rare’ series puts forth week on week. Now showing this week is Shuttlecock Boys which as the extremely nervous debutant director Hemant Gaba clarifies much in advance has less to do with the badminton game. A story of 4 friends, each harbouring individual aspiration in a middle class setting where dreams are bigger than the pockets that can afford them.

We have our usual suspects – the stud Loveleen (Manish Nawani), the nerd Pankaj (Alok Kumar), the foodie Manav (Aakar Kaushik) and the idealist Vijay Prateek (Gaurav). Each battling own demons in personal and professional ways, they set out to start an enterprise together; laying foundation initially on each one’s merits and elevating it thru dedication and an extra tadka of bromance.