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Dhadak Movie Review: Janhvi Kapoor And Ishaan Khatter Can't Enliven Comatose Film

Cast: Janhvi Kapoor, Ishaan Khatter, Ashutosh Rana, Kharaj Mukherjee, Aishwarya Narkar
Director: Shashank Khaitan
Rating: 2 Stars (out of 5)

An attempted makeover of a tested storyline is never more than a handful of missteps away from turning into an outright mauling. The latter is exactly what Dhadak metes out to Nagraj Manjule's 2016 Marathi sleeper hit Sairat. A muddled screenplay, bland storytelling and uneven lead performances leave this glossy Karan Johar production without a proper, palpable heartbeat. With Bittergaon's Parshya and Archi, beleaguered lovers in whom we were deeply invested, giving way to a pair of prettified, pale shadows, it is only sporadically that Dhadak shows any signs of life. The rest of the 137-minute film can bore the pants off even the most indulgent Bollywood watcher.

Neither the blossoming of the furtive and risky romance between two college mates nor their forced flight from their hometown when their affair is discovered by the girl's ruthless, class-conscious family springs out of the screen quite in the profoundly affecting manner that it did in Sairat, a film that drew much of its efficacy from casual, confident understatement. The world that Dhadak creates is too synthetic. It lacks the power to evoke empathy.

In the original film, an air of dread and despair hangs over the young couple as they try to come to terms with their new life in Hyderabad. Dhadak's many ill-advised detours - narrative, ideational and locational - take the focus away from the plight of the lovers who are never out of harm's way even when they find what appears to be a safe haven a thousand miles away from home.

The script by director Shashank Khaitan (Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania, Badrinath Ki Dulhania) may well have been titled Madhukar Ki Dulhania. It deviates in major ways from Nagraj Manjule's trenchant, unfussy narrative built upon a keen personal understanding of the milieu that his film is set in. Dhadak transports the story to Udaipur, gives the two principal characters new names - Madhukar Bagla (Ishaan Khatter) and Parthavi Singh (Janhvi Kapoor) - and reduces to near-irrelevance the class and caste divides that the plot of Sairat swivelled around. This takes the sting out of the film's shocking climax.

The problem with Dhadak isn't, however, limited only to a weak ending or to the immediate lead-up to it. From its awkwardly farcical opening sequence in which a bizarre kachori-eating contest replaces the village cricket match with which Sairat kicks off all the way down to the couple's relocation to Kolkata in the second half to escape the fury of the girl's livid father and belligerent brother, nothing that writer-director Khaitan rustles up is able to pitchfork Dhadak out of its comatose state.

Just ahead of the first half's principal flashpoint, a stolen kiss that unleashes mayhem, all the principal characters, choreographed by Farah Khan, get together to belt out a robust version of the peppy Zingat. But what about some zing, please? That commodity goes completely missing from Dhadak. The onus is on Janhvi and Ishaan to tide over the film's drawbacks - they do not try - and enliven the wishy-washy proceedings. Dhadak is as dull as ditchwater. So no matter how hard the two actors endeavour to win us over with their vulnerabilities, which they do a pretty good job of harnessing, theirs is an uphill task.

Pressed into the service of this enervated remake, their efforts are unable to guide Dhadak away from its inconsistent arc. The film gets neither the love story nor the socio-political context of Sairat right. The script makes too many gratuitous changes for its own good. Udaipur's Lake Pichola and the impressive structures around it add up to a visually striking backdrop, but they cannot compensate for the soulless nature of the narrative.

The male protagonist's father, a lowly fisherman in Sairat, is a restaurateur in Dhadak. In one scene refer to the uchhi jaat (high caste) of Parthavi's family and warns him to stay away from the girl. Parthavi's dad isn't a big, thriving farmer like Archana Patil's father - he is instead a big-talking small-town overlord Ratan Singh (Ashutosh Rana), whose ambition is to dislodge a long-serving MLA from her perch and enjoy the fruits of political power. He does have his way but only to lose his seat before the film winds down. His anger shoots through the roof and the reverberations are felt in faraway Kolkata. Sairat's Parshya has two friends - Salim and Pradeep. The former is a Muslim bangle-seller's son who works in an auto mechanic's garage; the latter is a physically challenged young man who walks with a pronounced limp. They are a disadvantaged trio in a rural setting run with an iron hand over by a land-owning, politically connected Maratha family that is acutely aware of its position and power.

n Dhadak, Madhukar's sidekicks are Gokul (Ankit Bisht) and Parshuram (television's 'tiny man' Shridhar Watsar), who is charged with providing comic relief. Beyond that, the duo contributes precious little to the plot - the Dalit-Muslim-differently abled axis is done away with, and what is left of it is employed only for a largely superficial purpose.

Gokul and Parshuram, in another key departure from the Sairat plot, do make a reappearance in the film's second half to lend moral support to Madhukar and Parthavi in Kolkata, where they are in hiding in a hostel run by a gentleman called Sachin Bhowmick (Kharaj Mukherjee). The name is obviously borrowed from one of commercial Hindi cinema's most prolific screenwriters, whose credits range from India's 1958 Cannes Competition entry Lajwanti to 2006's Krrish, with a wide array of megahits in the interim (An Evening in Paris, Aradhana, Karma, Karan Arjun, Koi Mil Gaya, et al).

Dhadak review: Not sticking to the original theme makes Ishaan Khatter, Janhvi Kapoor's film weak

Dhadak Review:The film is set in Udaipur where an upper caste girl (Janhvi Kapoor) falls in love with a lower caste boy (Ishaan Khatter).

Updated: Jul 20, 2018 08:47 IST

By Rohit Vats, Hindustan Times, New Delhi

Dhadak
Cast: Janhvi Kapoor, Ishaan Khatter
Director: Shashank Khaitan
Rating: 2.5/5

Udaipur in Rajasthan functions as a battleground in Dhadak, the remake of Marathi hit Sairat (2016). Beneath its shining heritage hotels breathes a population that's not free to fall in love, at least not outside the bounds set generations ago. The high domes of erstwhile palaces and the deep lakes are only a facade to conceal the real identity of its people that is defined by caste.

Parthavi (Janhvi Kapoor), daughter of hotelier and political strongman Ratan Singh (Ashutosh Rana), refuses to abide by these rules. She is strong-willed, evocatively boisterous and definitely not subtle. In true 90s style, she taunts and challenges Madhukar's (Ishaan Khatter) masculinity and the lower caste boy decides to tread a difficult path.

It's a familiar set-up. We have seen many such stories, but there is a reason Sairat clicked immediately and Dhadak lacks that instant appeal. Actually, it's the difference between what you know and what you feel. Sairat might have impressed Shashank Khaitan, the director, for its symbolism and its penetrating yet unpretentious tone, but when he decided to remake it, he focused on aesthetically shot scenes instead of building up a life-threatening conflict.

The complexity of relationships in Sairat was more natural and it went well with the locales. Nagraj Manjule, the director of Sairat, emphasised on getting the milieu right. He set things up step by step. First, Archie and Parshya met, weighed up their options and then jumped into it with everything they had, only to find that reality is not rose-tinted.

The adaptation suits Janhvi Kapoor and Ishaan Khatter in the beginning. An easy-breezy love story makes the audience laugh, mostly because of Ishaan's innocent frolics. He keeps it simple by not going overboard. He is not film-y. In fact, he is like any other urban teenager who aspires for better things in life and isn't on the same wavelength as his parents. He understands social intricacies, but decides to look beyond them.

Another tonal difference between Sairat and Dhadak is its treatment of male leads. The shy Parshya was a by-product of years of oppression, but Ishaan's Madhu is more or less vocal. He is from a well-off family who never expects things to escalate beyond their control.

How closely you witnessed the harsh realities of life formed the base of Sairat. Dhadak tries to replicate it, but doesn't go all guns blazing to address pertinent questions related to caste. It's more of a class distinction than caste in Dhadak.