Ek Deewana Tha
At: Suburbia and other cinemas
Directed by Gautham Menon
Cast: Prateik, Amy Jackson, Manu Rishi and others
Rating: *
It’s just the second month of 2012, and Ek Deewana Tha already seems like the worst film of the year. An outdated plot, old-style narration and actors so bad, they ought to be arrested for causing trauma.
Gautham Menon is a successful director in the South, and Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa, the Tamil original is said to be a big hit. Either something vital got missed out in the remake, or it’s just an inexplicable North-South difference in movie tastes. The Hindi version is long, painful and utterly boring.
If the story is so clichéd and unappealing, the least the director can do is cast good actors, and give it a zippy pace. EDT fails on all counts. Amazing that screenwriters and directors still believe that a guy stalking a girl is an acceptable way of expressing love, and that the girl going flip-flop between her attraction towards the stalker and love for her parents is cute. For the viewer nothing could be more excruciating than a miscast lead pair going through the motions
without even an iota of intensity of conviction. Worse, they speak Hindi as if they were foreigners (well, one of them is) reading out lines in an unfamiliar language from cue cards.
Prateik plays Sachin, an unemployed engineer and aspiring filmmaker, who falls in love at first sight with Jessie (Amy Jackson), his neighbour and landlord’s daughter. His Maharashtrian family is cool with the interreligious romance, but her brother and father are so conservative, they don’t even watch films. (Early in the film Mr Joseph asks, “Who is Amitabh Bachchan? He probably comes from another planet).
There is not much drama or conflict in the story, except the girl not being able to make up her mind and the guy refusing to take no for an answer. And then, much after the viewer has lost interest, the film goes on interminably, squeezing in a couple of droning songs (AR Rahman? Really?)
There’s none of the freshness and delight of young love, just the drudgery of a filmmaker short of ideas and actors who looked more puzzled than passionate.
Prateik does not have the presence or talent to carry off a solo lead, and Amy Jackson (with her skin changing colour in every scene) is not an actress at all.
(How desperate it is to use a supposed romance between the two as a promotional tool!) Manu Rishi plays that typical filmi friend who has nothing better to do that follow the ‘hero’ around; Ramesh Sippy (the director) makes an appearance as himself—why in this of all films?