The film is about luring the girl. The filmmaker is about luring the audience. Khareedi toh Phasee (If you buy, you are trapped)….the ticket of course!

Put shortly and succinctly, the film is a canvas of clichés…its images stolen from the repertoire of its own production house. The large Indian family circumscribed as the GUJJU clan…hail from Kal Ho Na Ho. The convoluted confusion between love and friendship emanate from Student of the Year. The girl-in-jeans sporting a bob cut metamorphosing into the girl-in-sharara sprouting blow dried curls reminisce in the memory of Kuch Kuch Hota Hain. So, when we admired and adored the Dharma glories earlier, why not this time, you may ask! Because this time, he collaborates with a cutting edge production house Phantom and its experimental owner Anurag Kashyap to reflect a ‘new age’, realistic love story of contemporary youth.

So, while I wait in the darkness of the cinema hall for the silver screen enlightenment about the youth and romance of today, of my day, of might-as-well-be-me…I encounter the following:

An exceptionally intellectual IIT-graduated chemical engineer whose waits for her sister’s permission and her lover’s suggestion to meet with her father after a gap of 7 years.

A struggling, failing businessman who chooses and changes his career in accordance to the preference of his girlfriend, fiancée, wife!

A young, ambitious, dominating, rich model who waits for all the 7 pheras to get over before reacting to the discovery that her fiance is in love with someone else.

While the characters echoed a stereotypical and arbitrary construction of convenience, the plot was conveniently forgotten. For, its implausibility screamed out with every successive scene where the groom-to-be has no intimate or romantic scene with the bride-to-be until the day of the wedding. This is the new age plot where there are only two possibilities between a young man and a young girl- either they are ex-es or they are an imminent couple.

A cute naivety pervades the plot, the concept and therefore the whole cinematic panorama of this romantic comedy. Red flowers, fireworks, drenched rain and heart-shaped cushion…belong to a realm of depressing, unromantic clichés. Sexual sparks, forced intimacy over open back blouses seem like the naïve imagination of a stunted child. A cuteness that God forbid may appeal to gullible romantics! A naivety that God forbid may influence the young and growing.