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  Manisha Lakhe

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There’s an old saying, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Never has this been truer for any other remake, adaptation or copy in the history of Indian cinema. Appallingly bad choice is the kindest one could be to explain …

There’s an old saying, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Never has this been truer for any other remake, adaptation or copy in the history of Indian cinema. Appallingly bad choice is the kindest one could be to explain Gautam Menon’s fall from grace. He allows a big studio to ruin his very special love story by offering his Hindi audience a mindless, odiously inferior version of the original.



Not that the original version was Roman Holiday, but the music is so memorable, and the subtitles helped endear the not-Ryan Gosling-in-the-looks-department hero to the audiences because he could emote. The heroine Trisha was just brilliant and we have been offered her poor country cousin version in Ekk Deewana Tha. The original Vinaythaandi Varuvaaya worked because the story was written with the two very similar and yet vastly different cultures in mind, and set in a city that seems modern and yet very segregated in its roots anchored by custom and tradition. Everything in the frame created a mood and was there for a reason. The girl who takes a chartered bus to work, her clothes, her need to conform, her father’s religious compulsions, the hero’s need to pen everything down because he knows he needs to tell a story on film some day... Alas, Gautam Menon give this beautiful treasure up for cheap retelling.



So you decide to re-tell the story. Why did you drown your common sense in the backwaters of Kerala? Thankfully, this utter lack of sense creates much room for heckling and inadvertent laughter.

‘Dad did not let me see movies’, She says, and everybody in the audience mutters, ‘Riiiiight!’And some smart aleck heckles, ‘And TV hasn’t been invented either!’

The phone plays a very important part in the heroine’s life. She seems to be talking to phantom friends all the time. In fact the phone is so important to her, we see the phone in her hand when the hero and the heroine embrace. Huge marketing opportunity lost in finding telecom partners...



And yes, the need for showing how serious/studious/professional the heroine is fulfilled when she appears in a song with a laptop bag!

The director brings out the mothering instincts in all the females in the audience by making sure the make up on the heroine is more suitable for Neetu Singh of Dhan Daulat (she owns a car garage) than for someone who sits in an air-conditioned office analysing data on the computer. The grease-engine oil combination adds nothing to the young British actor pretending to be Mallu. Maybe they should have used some of that oil to her frizzed hair which makes her look as though she had been moonlighting in a scary movie.



And the choice of that name for the hero is rather unfortunate. Each time someone in the movie called him by his name, a section of the audience bored out of their wits with the poor dialog delivery and the lack of chemistry between the lead actors, would shout, ‘Saaachin! Saachin!’ as they would at a cricket stadium.

Digitally altering Prateik’s voice to make it sound less like an eleven year old girl did much to encourage hecklers to say ruder things about the posed show of triceps and biceps by holding his head John Abraham style. And the Springboek/ Riverdance like leaps ever so often were more alarming than sweet. In fact sometimes, he leaped so high, he could easily jump up to the first floor to meet her instead of taking the steps.



I know I am being rather unkind here. But the original was so dipped-in-honey delectable and so grounded in spite of the fairy tale idea of love-at-first-sight (see it online here), that this slow-paced, never ending disaster of a movie simply annoys you.

The one and only saving grace is Manu Rishi who plays the mentor, voice of reason to the dumb hero. But even his presence and role cannot save this Titanic, especially when the iceberg is the director himself.