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[/amazon_link]Rating : Poor (1/5)
Genre : Romance
Year : 2014
Running time : 2 hours 15 minutes
Director : Devika Bhagat
Cast : Abhay Deol, Preeti Desai, Rati Agnihotri, Jayant Kripalani, Yashika Dhillon
Kidwise : G
In this film, the end is more like the beginning. I’m not kidding; it really is. Here is why:
Amit Sharma (Deol) is a young man being badgered by family to settle down with a suitable girl, post breakup with girlfriend Radhika. Samara Patel (Desai) is a young woman seeking success in her dream career of dancing. For her, life is hampered by an alcoholic mother and a missing dad. Still, where’s the fun without the melodrama and the hardship, yeah? We are like this only and blah-blah-blah . . . You’d assume that angels sing and flowers bloom when the twain meet. Ha! But they don’t even meet; the angels went to bed, just waiting.
Therein lies the nub of the problem.
Amit and Samara are two separate people, potential lifemates, we assume. So we go on and on, perusing their lives and their struggles, but the two might as well be in separate movies for all the romance in this film. I mean, I can see what the director thought this was going to be – introduce us to two lovely, lovable people. Build them up as independent characters in their own right, so when the two do meet, the earth moves, the crescendo booms, etc. because this would be true love, no? The meeting of the minds, yeah? Except that this does not happen.
This could have been a refreshing film, but kinda goes south. The characters while interesting are not charismatic enough to anchor the film on their own, and they are on their own for most of the movie. The entire film is about the (boring) lives of the characters, but at the end of the film, I’d be hard pressed to say I “knew” them. The film also seriously lacks any romantic development; this is the Kalahari of romances and you are stuck in the middle, lost and thirsty. You think you spy an oasis, but sadly it is but a mirage.
Abhay Deol generally picks interesting films, but with this one he’s produced an actual dud, a non-starter. With his fauxhawk hairstyle and “I’m-so-pakaoed” shenanigans, he comes across here as a little boy throwing a tantrum. Desai we last saw in Shor in the City. She does well in the mother-daughter scenes (Dubey plays her mom) but as an Indo-British gal trying to find her feet in Mumbai’s artistic waters, she remains a little too distant and aloof.
Rati Agnihotri and Jayant Kripalani make a cute parental unit, and Lilette Dubey is lovely as always. Even the back-talking prospective “bahu” Shishika (Dhillon) had personality, so it’s a pity that the lead characters had none.
I’m so unimpressed.
Kidwise : Clean.
