Saturday, September 19, 2015
Katti Batti
Woeful
Romance
Madhav and Payal live together, play ‘let’s
marry’ games which they film on home video. Why don’t they get married?
Just. Because they think living in is
some major achievement.
Just goes to show how out of touch with the
times Nikhil Advani is, though his Katti Batti tries so hard to be cool, cute
and youthful. Madhav aka Maddy (Imran Khan) and Payal (Kangana Ranaut) meet in
college where he is studying architecture and she god-knows-what. Maddy’s all knowing sister (Mithila Palkar) says that Payal is wrong
for him because she has more friends than him on Facebook and has travelled much
more than him. Her family situation is
also vague—absentee, astonishingly indifferent parents, who remain offscreen.
Payal has the kind of look that is meant to
suggest that she is freespirited, which means she is nutty and has a pet
tortoise called Milkha. Maddy is an out-and-out wimp who gets dumped by Payal
and then carries around that tortoise in a heart-shaped box, and also drinks
phenyl to commit suicide!
When his constant whining fails—and he has friends who have nothing to
do but sort his romantic mess—he stalks her friends and tries to stop her
wedding to another guy. In this misguided adventure he has help from some random Delhi strangers
who call themselves Fosla, which stands for Frustrated One Sided Lovers
Association.
The film that goes back and forth in trying to
tell the trite and tired Maddy-Payal love story, is meaningless, derivative (right
from Love Story, to 500 Days of Summer, to The Fault In Our Stars) and boring.
The lead pair and their army of idler friends are annoying. It doesn’t help
that there is no spark between Imran Khan and Kangana Ranaut; that he has been
playing basically the same character over and over, so that he should have
perfected it by now. And if she is going to be dumped with Tanu-like Quirky
with a capital Q characters henceforth, then her newfound superstardom is not
going to last too long.
Hollywood does the quite romcom well, Bollywood
is struggling to catch up, so much so that English lines are translated
literally into Hindi. Who says woh aage
badh chuki hai, for she has moved on?
Labels: Cinemaah
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