Plot Summary – A young medical student falls in love with a man who plans to travel the world and never settle down, or get married.

Language – Hindi

★★★½ 

Watched on 30 Nov 2021

As a (sometimes too) proud South Indian, who would post stuff like #stophindiimposition, I avoided Bollywood for a long time. As I have moved to the US and all our cultural differences and diversity has been erased and replaced with the tag ‘Desi’, I find myself overwhelmed by North Indian culture whether that’s the fact that I cannot find a dosa to save my life or that I’m bombarded with Hindi content at every opportunity as if India doesn’t have 22 official languages on every rupee note. I am yet to hear a single Malayalam or Tamil or Telugu song at any Indian event (one can only dream of Kannada). Rants aside, as a part of yet another one of these events, I was given the opportunity to watch this film and as many of my friends found this to be a very nostalgic film, I thought why not give it a try. I won’t lie, I was highly entertained by this film. There was not a single second where I was bored, but I think this is because I allowed myself to laugh at the film rather than force myself to laugh with it. The first half of this film was some of the most poorly written and low-key problematic bits of a film I’ve seen. The jokes mostly didn’t land and the humour for me came from the sheer cheesiness and cringe of the scenes. I couldn’t believe that self-respecting actors were saying these lines and acting out this script. It plays into every stereotype possible and makes some very problematic jokes. All the female characters feel like they were obviously written by men and the male characters all come off as out-of-touch. However, post-intermission this film takes a surprising turn. There are a lot of moments of absolute cringe, don’t get me wrong but there was a surprising amount of heart as well. It was an extensive if not particularly deep examination of love. I must admit, I still found myself laughing my ass off at the dialogue in every interaction between Ranbir and Deepika no matter how serious or emotional it was supposed to be but I found that the rest of the character interactions and dynamics were very well fleshed out and interesting. I really wanted Ranbir and Aditya Roy Kapur to make out but maybe those are just issues I need to work through. I particularly like what they did with the Taran character as they subverted expectations. All the performances are decent, I didn’t feel like any of these actors were at their best. I audibly gasped when Rana Dagubatti came on screen and Ranbir acted like he could take him. Deepika speaks Hindi exactly like a Bangalore girl would and that makes me smile every time. I also really really loved most of the music in the film, I recognized most of the songs and they had me headbanging the whole time. Overall, I had an amazing time with this mediocre film and I don’t know what else I can say. Watch it if you aren’t a robot.