Nothing Rings True !

At the end of the movie as I sighed over a lost chance, it seemed like three great creatives who seemed to bask in their individual luminescence without ever properly connecting. With Imtiaz you know that you can get ready for wit flying all around without any background music drowning out the calm esoteric exchanges. One is always ready to be pleasantly surprised as he fries culture to a light brown without ever burning it. His quest for defining love continues. However for once I found a connect between all the three missing – the director and the two actors don’t seem to thread convincingly.

A tour guide in Europe who diminishes his own self esteem while leading around groups of gawking tourists while not dithering from moving around in a Jagaur open top or was it a Bentley. And he bumps into the female tourist who is for a flimsy reason searching for a ring and that somehow is supposed to be the excuse for a road trip. I think the collapse begins with this unconvincing plot. Searching open roads wide eyed,  days after losing it somehow ridicules the purpose of the story itself. Assuming that it is just a ruse for the director to escape to his favourite cobbled stone pathways in picturesque Europe, the lost ring rings so untrue. Add to that insufficiently fleshed out references to Gujarati and Punjabi where mention of Dhokla, Fafda and Tractor somehow are sufficient to infuse strength of their native backgrounds into the characters or so the makers believe.

Their travails are nothing to write home about except to mention that it seems like a long dialogue smattered with chuckle worthy witticisms along the way but few and far. The monotony of the dialogue drags you down such that the entry of an interesting goon actually brightens things up.
The hero is clearly unconvinced that he should play out his tour guide character to the hilt so he must have impressed on the director to allow him to own a high end car and book tickets to a metropolitan city in India while for some strange reason he is unwilling to go back home. Home as punctuated by grey and white eerie clips reminding one of Love Aaj Kal Saif Ali Khan’s track.

SRKs cheeky romance which girls swooned over seems intact but lacks lustre. It is really Anushka with her high decibel performance almost risking going over the top that keeps you from rejecting it outright. She seems to have a reaction for every dialogue that her costar mouths. She breathes a lot of spunky life into her act.

The music drags the movie down while the superior photography compensates. Except for the hummable Hawayein a song where SRK seems to come into form and the song also syncs with the spirit of the film

I sense a disparity in the intended script of Imtiaz and the final execution probably imposed by the makers. Else it is difficult to find a confused Imtiaz after his brilliant JWM or a LAK or the more recent Highway or Rockstar. The characters grow on you for sure but you hardly feel for them in the lackluster climax other than to heave a sigh of relief and rush to catch your last bus home.