As you sit cross-eyed and tense waiting for the young lovers in Ambala to sort out the mess in matters of the heart, you wonder how many rip-offs, homages, tributes and remakes of Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge we would have to bear through before this….errr…classic is put to rest.
It may be sacrilegious to say this. But DDLJ, in my humble opinion, is hardly the stuff classics are made of. It had its moments of glory…Oh yes! But a repeatedly recycled classic? Nah! That’s going too far. Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania (HSKD) takes the Raj and Simran characters, shakes and stirs them and turns them on their head. Varun Dhawan and Alia Bhatt, two of our most talented contemporary actors, don’t really try to fill Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol’s shoes. They have better things to do.
He, Humpty (yes, that’s what our hero is called) can’t keep it in his pants….his money, that is. He spends it buying a lehenga for the wedding of the girl of his dreams. She uses the money to buy him a car of his dreams.
You really wish the director had left these two annoying characters to their dreams and devices. These are the kind of 20-something over-reachers who need to be told “to get a life” don’t mean to beg, borrow, or steal material happiness.
When we first meet…err, Humpty, he emerges from a loo behind a sheepish looking girl. In her introduction scene Kavya (Alia Bhatt) is shown trying to bully her father into buying her a Manish Malhotra lehenga for her wedding to the “perfect” NRI.
The “perfect” NRI is played by television actor Siddharth Shukla, so exceptionally wooden he seems to be carved out of a tree. And there he should have remained. Perfect NRI proceeds to behave as shadily as Parmeet Sethi in DDLJ. For those who came in late, Parmeet Sethi had played Kajol’s boorish fiance in DDLJ. Here he is so showily suave he could be a model for agarbattis. No one in HSKD seems to feel any real emotions. It is all a pantomime of being cool.
There are characters in Humpty’s saga equivalent to the ones in DLLJ, all subverted to the point of appearing farcically over-blown. Except Ashutosh Rana, who does a dignified take on Amrish Puri from the original, no one else gets it right.
Clearly, the debutant director is here doing a revisionist version of DDLJ, much in the same way that Sanjay Leela Bhansali did with Romeo & Juliet in Ram-Leela. With one difference. The creator of the revisionist version of the “classic” (provided you consider DDLJ a classic) lacks the vision to take the original characters to another level from where they originally stood.
Director Shashank Khaitan yanks the characters from DDLJ from their allotted places and takes them on a joyride, which may be pleasurable for the characters but is of minimal joy or interest to the audience.
Standing credibly firm in this earthquake of dismantled storytelling are Varun Dhawan and Alia Bhatt. Endearing in their affection for DDLJ, they are like two well-armed soldiers waiting for the battle to begin. Alas, the ammunition provided to them is like water pistols masquerading as AK-47s.
More miniature and spoofy versions of Bonnie and Clyde than Raj and Simran from DDLJ the couple in HSKD are eminently uninspiring and hopelessly self-seeking. At mid-point, when the girl jumps in bed with the stranger who buys her the lehnga from her dreams, you know once and for all that this pair is beyond repair. Simran would have never done that.
Varun Dhawan said in an interview with Subhash K Jha conducted just before the release of Humpty Sharma that he had loads of fun shooting for this comedy. “Oh, very different! I actually had to change my acting style completely and unlearn a lot of things that I had applied to my characters earlier on. Both of us influenced each other’s performances to a large extent. In Humpty…, she plays a character who’s a lot like me. I am charged up and aggressive and a bundle of energy. I play a character who is sensitive and restrained like her. So, in that sense, we swapped characters. And that could only happen because we both knew one another so well. I am very comfortable with Alia. And I know she’s comfortable with me. We understand each other so well that we forget when the camera is rolling. Alia has a terrific memory and she’s brilliant with her lines whereas I like to improvise a lot. By the time we reached the end of shooting for Humpty…¦, Alia was improvising like me. I think we had a lot fun shooting this film. We want people to see a bit of themselves in our characters.”
