Cast: Aditya Roy Kapur, Shraddha Kapoor, Naseeruddin Shah, Leela Samson
Director: Shaad Ali
A boy shifts his base to Mumbai to pursue his dreams of making it big someday. Another girl too moves to Mumbai to follow her dreams. And as expected, their chance meeting sparks a heady romance while their respective careers demand that they go in for their individual goals. Matters of the heart have always been Mani Ratnam’s forte, and his Tamil film O Kaadhal Kanmani that released in 2015, was a simple breezy romance that amassed profits instantly after its release, apart from the critical acclaim that the lead stars garnered for themselves.
One would have imagined a similar response to its Hindi remake Ok Jaanu helmed by Shaad Ali, but only if Ali had infused this Mumbai production set against the backdrop of contemporary Mumbai, with some newness to start with, it would have worked in his favour. Instead, he does not even make the effort of adding his own bit of local flavour to the script, and delivers us an almost unashamed copy of the original. One wonders what Mr Ali had on his mind while calling the shots this time. Or is it that the job of the creative team was to simply duplicate scenes from the original? Coming from the director of Saathiya and Bunty Aur Babli, it was a major disappointment for me. None of the players exhibits much personality, but it’s hard to fault them, given how thinly the characters have been imagined by screenwriters.
Friendship plays a vital role in the film. Aditya (Aditya Roy Kapur) comes to Mumbai and stays with his father’s best friend (Naseeruddin Shah) and his wife (Leela Samson). He makes his presence felt right in the early days as a videogame developer at workplace. Friends at his office have all the time to allow him to dream and have his way too. His close friends who keep him in good humour seem the kind who would do anything for him. Even when he accidentally meets Tara (Shraddha Kapoor) at his friend’s wedding, and falls for her natural charm, his, as well as, her friends are most supportive. Aditya later finds out Tara is planning to pursue her studies in Paris. He too looks focused and would rather concentrate on building his career. Both seem to gel as two individuals, and fall in love as they decide to go on an impromptu holiday together. They also agree that marriage is not meant for them, and even decide to have a live-in relationship with the approval of his uncle (Shah), of course.
The film does not probe the human heart the way one would expect it to. Aditya seems focused on his job, but behaves as if he would go bonkers if he doesn’t get what he wishes: love. He flirts and flits between sudden spasms of energy and lunacy as a man who wants to go to the US for further advancement of his career. But is seen forever jumping about or chasing his girl. Tara too is studying architecture and has all the makings of a great architect. The only thing is: she gets distracted as soon as she encounters Aditya anywhere, which is literally anywhere — from cafes, to her office to railway platforms to trains. The film wavers between a lighthearted romance and one’s ambition of achieving one’s dreams. Thankfully, there is no effort here to push the film along shock value lines, pushing it more into the lines of what a “man on a mission” would do, or a girl too focused on her life would propagate as routine.
Aditya has a long way to go as an actor though to be fair, in a couple of scenes, he did make me sit up and take note of him. Shraddha, on the other hand, looks and enacts her part with elan.
What the original film did very well was to voice the unpredictability of life and the modern day perspective on taking life as it comes. Here, the interactions would have benefited the overall engagement of the viewer, had the romance of the elderly (Shah and Samson) been a little more attentively underlined. The young couple unlearning, and then learning about romance from the two thespians would have added the much-needed zing to the proceedings.
Samson is charming as an Alzheimer patient whose husband dotes on her. The romantic scenes between the ageing couple evoke a sense of passion that’s seldom seen in Bollywood cinema. Shah seems to come back to his original self as one of the few most dependable actors and steals a few scenes.
If only the vacuum abruptness of the film had not stalled our hopes!
The writer is a film critic and has been reviewing films for over 15 years. He also writes on music, art and culture, and other human interest stories.
