If I
could really take my eyes off the extremely sweet, lovable, charming, carefree
and magically inexplicable Parineeti Chopra in debutante Vinil Matthew’s ‘no
non-sense’ romantic comedy HASEE TOH PHASEE, I would have certainly noticed the
‘time demands’ merger of one of the most celebrated production houses in the
industry and the most promising pool of talents. No wonder the product in
result comes out as one of the most refreshing, brilliantly acted, smartly
written but quite a balanced in nature rom-com in recent.
It neither
forces you with the typical candy floss boy-meets-girl feel with all those unreal
slow-motion shots overflowing with foot-tapping song & dance numbers and forceful
melodramatic complications in the storyline. Karan Johar style of cinema
masters in that league. Nor it makes you feel drained out with insipid,
self-indulged, dead existent stories with layered harsh reality what Anurag Kashyap
school of cinema is known for. It stands somewhere in the middle of both.
Nikhil,
played by Sidharth Malhotra is all set to loose his bachelorhood for his girlfriend
Karisma [Adah Sharma] of 7 years. Just 7 days to the d-day & he happens to
meet a girl from the bride-side who’s no one else but Karisma’s younger sister
Meeta, played by the infectious livewire called Parineeti Chopra. She supposedly
was a drug-addict. She has this weird syndrome that deals with different kind
of sensations in body as described by her, “thartharahat, sarsarahat, sansanahat, gudgudahat, dagmagahat, farfarahat
& more”. She takes pills to be active on life. She eats toothpastes. She blinks
her eyes in a certain ‘in your face’ way. She talks faster than you imagine. She’s
anything but the girl next door; still you will find it hard to look anywhere
else if she’s there in the frame. You feel connected to the girl who is equally
sentimental but confined & reserved in revealing the wounds from her past.
Same goes with confused Nikhil who is now left with choices that could ruin or
rule his life afterward.
HASEE
TOH PHASEE is a good mix of over-the-top Indian emotions with uber cool practicalities
of today’s generation. So, if there is a ‘would-be Damaad’ asking for financial help from his ‘would-be Sasur’- a saree king, in the most unhesitant
manner, you would also find a rigidly traditional family that could abandon
their kid for life as she had once decided to run away from the house. Though the
film couldn’t save itself from being conventional & convenient specifically
in the storyline, it compensates that with the garden-fresh characters [Casting
director Mukesh Chhabra deserves applause for giving apt faces to fill the
requirement], believable performances, quirky-witty-smart writing [Harshvardhan
Kulkarni takes the credit here] & a sense of pragmatism while dealing with
the situations. Beautifully cinematographed & crisply edited! But the
performances are above all especially Parineeti. She amazes, surprises &
also manages to move your heart with her ‘blinking eyes’ presence on screen. Sidharth
plays it highly confident and a total fit for the role.
At the
end, it feels good to see that the genre of romantic comedy in Bollywood is
getting blessed by good grown-up writing. Watch it if you want a nice break
from regular romantic love-stories! Watch not if you still believe in unreal
overdramatic romance only made for cinema-screens! [3.5/5]
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