~~Befikre Review & Boxoffice Thread~~ - DT N P 92 - Page 24

A still from the film.

Leaving the cinema at the end of Befikre, having spent two hours and ten minutes in the company of its shallow protagonists, I felt exhausted. Just flat out drained watching how much of an effort the film makes to appear effortless. How hard it tries to give the impression that it's not trying at all.

Bollywood doesn't do romantic comedies very well. What starts out light and frothy inevitably ends up in mawkish melodrama. Mercifully, writer-director Aditya Chopra avoids these traps, keeping the film's tone consistently breezy and seldom seguing into rona dhona. Delhi boy Dharam (Ranveer Singh) and Paris-born Shyra (Vaani Kapoor) haven't even known each a few hours before they're swapping saliva and slipping between the sheets. But not for one moment does their shared chemistry burn up the screen. For all the kiss-kiss-wham-bam, the sparks are missing.

It's been 12 years since the iconic sitcom Friends winded up, and god knows many of us are addicted to its reruns. But Chopra appears to suffer from an unhealthy obsession with the show, lifting scenarios and modeling his leads after those characters. In his very opening scene, he borrows from that famous break up between Ross and Rachel where he demands his shirt back from her.

But Dharam's standup comic character is actually inspired by Joey from the sitcom - the stag who hits on every woman, and doesn't believe in commitment. On the surface, tour guide Shyra seems tailor-made for him - she isn't looking for a relationship, is always up for a dare, and the two decide early on that they'll never say "I love you" to each other.

The pair lives it up in Paris, singing, dancing, wolfing down waffles and beer until they do fall in love. The problem is that the script doesn't quite know what to do with them. They flit from one scenario to the next - French kissing endlessly, going through a breakup, becoming friends a year after the split, going on double dates, getting engaged to other people in a very Love Aaj Kal kind of way. But none of this ever seems to touch us. Dharam and Shyra just come across as fake.

What's even more tiring is that the two strip down at the drop of a hat - to their underwear, to g-string bikins, to wrapped-up bedsheets, and in Ranveer's case, even going bare bottom in one scene. They also must be the world's most nimble-footed standup comic and tour guide - they hip-hop, tango, salsa and waltz like they're competing in the finals of So You Think You Can Dance.

The typical Yashraj tropes are all here - eye-watering foreign locations, a conversation that links parathas to following your heart, Punjabi parents who watch benevolently, a Bollywood karaoke session, and yes, self-referencing the studio's films endlessly. Just one moment in all this seems clever - when Shyra turns the palat scene from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge on its head.

The rest of Befikre is sheer silliness, especially an Anees Bazmee-style climax scramble in a church. Vishal-Shekhar's infectious tunes and the glossy cinematography are easy on the ear and the eye, but the film ultimately wears you out.

Ranveer Singh does everything he can to elevate the material with his unputdownable energy, at times running the risk of overdoing it. Vaani Kapoor (who might want to have a word with the cameraman for shooting her most unflatteringly) goes for spunky but it's hit and miss.

What the film lacks is genuine feeling. Yes, even the frothiest of rom-coms need something real to keep you invested in its characters. I'm going with one-and-a-half out of five for Befikre. Aditya Chopra may have made one of Hindi cinema's most enduring love stories, but this is a souffl that sinks like a stone.

Befikre begins with Labon Ka Karobaar - literally, the business of lips - a musical number that would appear to double the number of kisses that have ever taken place in Hindi cinema. It's a Benetton advertisement's-worth of making out: kisses cutting across race, age, sex. And there's more kissing to come in the film - chaste pecks, fairly carnivorous attacks, sloppy ones that make you want to avert your eyes - most of it accompanied by swoony camera movements. A kiss, no matter how much Aditya Chopra would want you to believe, isn't just a kiss, it's an event.

Having introduced one major theme (in France, people kiss a lot), the film immediately sets about establishing another (relationships are messy). Dharam (Ranveer Singh) and Shyra (Vaani Kapoor) are having a knock-down-drag-out fight that ends not with her throwing a TV out of the window, surprisingly, but with him calling her a "French s**t". She leaves, and the film jumps back a year to show us how they got together in the first place. You know how it goes: two Indians meet in a European city, hook up/make out, decide later that they'll just be friends. Cocktail had the carnal version, Tamasha the chaste one. More worryingly for Befikre, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil explored similar territory little over a month ago.

While the copious smooching (and a split-second shot of a bare behind) will probably be cited as evidence of Befikre's progressive outlook, there's more substance in Dharam unexpectedly apologizing for his s**t remark. It was my inadequacy that made me judge you, he tells Shyra. You expect such a sentiment from Ranbir Kapoor, a star with an unusual propensity for exploring weakness, not so much from the cocksure Singh.

For the first hour, Befikre goes back and forth in time, tracking the pair's progress from hook-up to live-in couple, and returning periodically to their uneasy present. Watching Singh and Kapoor try and out-brazen each other is amusing at first (there's a whimsical scene, built around a cornflake, which takes place in a department store) but eventually, I began to wonder when the stakes would be raised, if there were to be stakes at all. Complications do surface, but Dharam and Shyra, with their dares and their rebellion and their annoying energy, are more t-shirt slogans than characters in whom one can emotionally invest. For a film about relationships, there's little insight offered into why we behave the way we do in love and lust, just a reiteration of that old chestnut: former lovers can't be friends.

Befikre is set entirely in France, and doesn't seem to have any qualms about resembling a glossy travel ad, building scenes around the Eiffel Tower and the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont Bridge. At one point, it's announced that the characters are headed to the "exclusive region of Picardy". This love of all things French is matched by the film's disdain for all things Delhi. Whenever Dharam says something unfortunate, Shyra retorts with "Kar di na Dilli waali baat (There's that Delhi thinking again)". I'm surprised that a film with such a monumentally shoddy (and casually cruel) final set-piece can afford to point fingers at anyone else's thought process.

When the Befikre trailer released, a friend told me she was worried Kapoor would be playing a version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She isn't, and there's a directness to her gaze and her speaking voice that suits the forthright Shyra. If there's a manic pixie in the film, it's Singh, who preens and struts around like he's on uppers. They're well-matched, these two actors, and it's unfortunate that the material they've been handed is so slight. A parting plea: could Bollywood directors reign in the self-referencing? There are three explicit nods to Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, which only serves to remind those who aren't charmed by self-homage that Chopra's reputation as a director rests almost exclusively on a film made 21 years ago.