Saturday, February 01, 2014
One By Two
Down The
Drain
One By Two
must be the only film ever in which the meet cute device is flatulence. Any
film that is so obsessed with bowels, is bound to be flushed down the drain.
The potty
motif –verbal and visual—is relentless, and you want to send digestive pills to
the team that came up with this film. Abhay Deol, who had smartly positioned
himself as the thinking viewers’ indie film actor, actually co-produced this
tedious, trying-so-hard-to-be-cool flick, about today’s youth.
And what
does it mean to be young? Needless angst, bad behaviour, drinking binges (with bottles
in a potty-shaped cooler), skimping on work and, yes, passing wind. And this sterling example of the new urban
youth (youth?) is Amit Sharma (Deol), dumped by his girlfriend (Geetika Tyagi),
because he is boring (he is!)
He works
with an IT company, has batty parents (Rati Agnihotri-Jayant Kripalani) who
bicker over table tennis on the dining table, has squabbling gyaan-giving friends (Preetika
Chawla-Tahir Bhasin) almost joined at the hip, a sharp tongued girl (Yashika Dhillon) his
mother wants him to marry. And what’s with the several police department poetry
slams just so that an uncle (Darshan Jariwalla) can spout silly verse?
The girl
who has a parallel track—which means lots of split screen, passing by each
other, sharing adjoining stalls in the loo (yes that potty fetish!)—is Samara
Patel (Preeti Desai) from London, who has an alcoholic mom and stuffed shirt
dad (Anish Trivedi) who won’t acknowledge her but gives them a palatial
apartment in Mumbai; there’s commitment-phobic boyfriend (Yudhishtr Urs) too.
She has a passion for dance, which leads her to a TV reality show, Dance Wars.
Amit and
his loser buddies are responsible for Samara and her chatterbox partner, a
street dancer called Bunty (Netarpal Singh Heera) getting evicted from the
show, because they manipulated the results for a reason too idiotic to go into.
The two unhappy
bores really deserve each other, but Bhagat, aiming to make a quirky film,
never gets them to meet till the audience is half asleep and not really
bothered about how this non love story will end. (There was a poignant foreign
film about two people perfect for each other, who never meet, but get people
rooting for them to connect, the title slips the mind)
Amit sings
a number that goes, “I am pakaoed”...the audience shares the sentiment.
Labels: Cinemaah
