Directors: Radhika Rao, Vinay Sapru
Cast: Mawra Hocane, Harshvardhan Rane, Manish Choudhari, Vijay Raaz
Before we delve into the depth of the film, it is important to mention that the debutants Mawra Hocane and Harshvardhan Rane are undoubtedly one of the most incredible performers who deserved a much-much better launch than this rusty and a little-too-stretched love story.
The story kicks off in an ordinary manner - a bad boy (Inder) meets a good girl (Saraswati Parthasarthy), some sparks hit, Saru gets a makeover and then eventually the bad boy falls in love with her. In this romantic tale, there is a conservative family of the girl where the father decides who’s going to marry who, where the mother hardly speaks and a younger sister who’s just too eager to get married. Had this film been released two decades back, it might have been successful in striking the chords with the audience and been a box office hit, but, we’ve come a long way from that era.
Saru is a geeky and ‘ugly’ looking girl. She is not only fed up of her life because no IIT-IIM passout is ready to marry her but also has to deal with the pressure that comes from her younger sister. ‘Why don’t you get smart and find a man?’, ‘IIT-IIM ka ladka phasana hai’. Yes, these are a few dialogues that explain the desperation of the family to get Saru married off.
Inder is the tattooed boy who has a mysterious aura surrounding him. To director’s credit, the gradual build up of that mystic feel did well for Inder unless it actually revealed.
The newcomers have definitely done a great job and it’s only because of the two actors that you might survive the 155-minutes-long running time. But the script is just too shoddy and the story line way too boring to sustain viewers’ interest. Having said that, we do wish that the director would have utilised the actors’ abilities instead of just wasting the performers. While we wish there was more to Mawra’s character than just weeping, weeping and some more weeping; we also wanted Harshavardhan’s character to express himself a lot more than just sticking to a plain serious face. Their true potential largely remains untapped.
It’s not only the cast that deserves a mention here but also the music of this film. It is both soothing, peppy and romantic. There’s one scene in the film where the lead protagonist goes to library and gives an insight into her love story as he flips through books and pages. The scene has been shot so well shot that it will remain with you. Probably, these are the only two things you might want to spend your money on. Some quirky characters; gullible policeman, a miscast South-Indian father and a sister just-waiting-to-get-married will evoke your laughter.
Out of the many loopholes in the film, some deserve a mention. The 155 minutes for a cliché love story amidst an ugly-duckling-turning-into-swan is just too much. Too much melodrama, too much body display doesn’t work unless you really have a story to it which clearly wasn’t the case. The sympathy-love point of the film was so repetitive that we actually started pitying ourselves for having to watch the entire film. The stereotyping of South Indian men (Saru’s father) pronouncing ‘Tum’ as ‘Thum’ could have been avoided. And not every woman should have been portrayed to be submissive, there are other shades to a woman too.
We really need to understand our filmmakers’ definition of ‘beautiful’ because even if the viewers have come a long way, they haven’t.
Rating: 2/5
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