Always Kabhi Kabhi

Starring: Giselli Monteiro, Zoa Morani, Lilette Dubey, Ali Fazal
Directed by Roshan Abbas
Rating: *

lways Kabhi Kabhi (AKK) comes across as a frothy high school romance with a message-in-the-bottle that could have been fun had it not been so exasperating. Frenemies Nandini (Zoa Morani), Sameer (Ali Fazal), Aishwarya (Giselli Monteiro) and Tariq (Satyajeet Dubey) spend their days shunting between their posh school and designer homes, falling in and out of love. Blotting their rosy existence are their parents’ efforts to chart their future. Abbas tries to present this as a larger malaise of dysfunctional homes, the lack of open communication between parents and their teenaged children.

A part of the film inventively plays out with one character providing online status updates to keep us in the loop, but when that quickly fizzles out, melodrama sets in, with a climax where the teens make a point to parents with a tacky song sequence (one of the many) called Antennae (frequencies don’t match, get it?). AKK is let down by a flat script and terrible actors who try too hard to get their teenage-speak right and throw about words like ‘dude’ and ‘whatever’ at regular intervals, and inane lines like ‘Undi the condi of my heart’, short for ‘Understand the condition of my heart’! If anything, AKK is convincing as a vehicle for loud product placement. At one point, the protagonists dance to a cola jingle that plays out as if it were part of the film’s soundtrack. If SRK’s lacklustre item number in the end is meant to add some spark, it does not. Not a single person in the theatre bothered to stay to watch it.