On the face of it there’s nothing remotely new about this film. The break-ups, the deceptions, the loneliness, the ambitions, the lost and found love, the search for love—these emotions are all too old and familiar. What works is the fact that the audience can still forge a connect with and feel for the characters and their dilemmas.
Anurag Basu lifts situations from Billy Wilder’s The Apartment and David Lean’s Brief Encounter. You could even see traces of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love In The Time of Cholera here. He offers vignettes rather than going deep into the whys and hows of relationships, a lot is implied rather than explored or explained. There is Shilpa stuck in a bad marriage with Kay Kay, who is having an affair in office with Kangana, who in turn, happens to be Shilpa’s sister Konkona’s flatmate. Kay Kay makes out with Kangana in the flat of Sharman, who is secretly in love with her. Shilpa falls for struggling actor Shiny. Her teacher Nafisa Ali meets her lost love Dharmendra at a time when he is ill and waiting to die. Konkona is a 30-year-old virgin looking for potential partners through shaadi.com and bumps into Irrfan whom she can’t stand.
Basu manages to knit all the disparate strands rather efficiently, gets a good ensemble performance and creates a mellow mood with the persistent rains of Mumbai as a perfect backdrop to the slippery relationships. There are some nice, delicate and funny moments: Shiny fixing Shilpa’s umbrella with a safety pin, Irrfan crying by the sea on getting the pre-wedding jitters, or the web of sexcapades at the BPO office. The mismatched couple—Irrfan (rivetingly comic) and Konkona (superbly spontaneous)—and silent lover Sharman are great. Nostalgia, however, does not work. The Dharmendra-Nafisa story feels more awkward than heart-warming. The resolution gets a bit too dramatic, silly and slapstick. I specially didn’t care for Pritam and his band intruding in the narrative. Their rock ballads are lovely, specially In dino, but why picturise them like music videos, they would have worked infinitely better as background score.
High Fives
Bollywood
1. Life In A Metro
2. Ta Ra Rum Pum
3. Good Boy Bad Boy
4. Spider-Man 3 (dubbed)
5. Bheja Fry
Hollywood
1. Spider-Man 3
2. 28 Weeks Later
3. Pirates of Caribbean: World’s End
4. Harry Potter: Order of Phoenix
5. "Lost"
Country
1. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (Miranda Lambert)
2. Pure BS (Blake Shelton)
3. Some Hearts (Carrie Underwood)
4. Let It Go (Tim McGraw)
5. Waking Up Laughing (Martina McBride)
Courtesy: Film Information
