Cinemaah

Is This Love?

What's the use of having a leading lady who utters rebellious word every time she opens her mouth; she smokes, drinks, presumably sleeps with her long term boyfriend, hates sentimentality, craves independence and a career… if in the end she has to feel sorry for her "immature" behaviour, kneel down in front of the guy  and beg him to marry her? What's worse, you know that is exactly what will happen even before the flimsy bonbon of a movie (which borrows a part of its plot from Love Aaj Kal) is a few scenes down.

Boringly, it begins with a wedding.  The hero Abhay’s (Imraan Khan) sister is going through one of those elaborate Delhi weddings with a hundred rituals, which is an excuse for Abhay and his childhood sweetheart Aaliya (Deepika Padukone) to dress up in various designer togs and dance, along with hundreds of similarly dressed extras.

Abhay and Deepika fell in love at the movies—his father (Navin Nischol) owns a cinema, she is the daughter of a former actress (Sharmila Tagore) who doesn’t want her to follow in her footsteps.  Everyone speaks in cute filmi dialogue, and the two lovers strike cute poses necking under a table.

Deepika wants to go for a year to Australia study, which causes a typhoon in her life.  Abhay throws a fit, her mother throws a fit and they make it sound as if she is being selfish and cruel, when it is perfectly reasonable move for a young person.

Anyway, she does land in Australia, squabbles with her stern aunt and miraculously gets to rent a beach shack owned by a cynical Nadia (Shahana Goswami) and her perpetually horny brother Cyrus (Yudhishtir Urs).  An insecure Abhay quickly follows her there, and soon enough a smothered Aaliya declares that she is through with him.

But a film that is about contemporary, urban, adults does not even consider the possibility that two people can fall out of love, see other people and maybe realize they have made a mistake.   Danish Aslam can populate the film with quirky characters (like the wise thrice divorced aunt played by Lillete Dubey), have characters mouth self-help-book profundities,  but it just never manages to be funny, and never reaches the level of melancholy it tries to drum up in its two shallow characters.

The background score drones away in the background, Deepika parades about in tiny shorts, Imran looks like he doesn’t know where he or the film is going, which is pretty much what the audience feels too.