Love’s Labour’s Lost

BEFIKRE TICKS practically every single box which constitutes the Yashraj canon. You can’t do better than Paris, gorgeous locationwise. Ranveer Singh oozes that certain irrepressible X factor, and he is paired with Vaani Kapoor, who added zing to the previous Yashraj prem kahani she featured in.

It’s all there, and yet, Befikre never quite rises above its shiny surface, and the absence of a story. In its best moments, it has sparkle, but those few and far between; in the rest, it stays bland and familiar.

First off, props to Aditya Chopra for fashioning a true-blue rom com (the first genuine Bollywood romantic comedy, Hum Tum, also came from the Yashraj stable), not a drama which begins with do dil ka pyaar and sinks into dhai kilo ka parivaar. Dharam Gulati (Singh) and Shyra Gill (Kapoor) collide sweetly in the obligatory meet-cute, and because they are in Paris, they instantly do as Parisians do: lock lips, long and hard. Whoa. So do these lovers stop your breath, when their saansein are mingling in this manner? This will go down as the film which got Bollywood to treat the kiss as just another pyaar ka izhaar (I’m deeply impressed with the adult behaviour of the CBFC in allowing us to witness such largesse). What Emran Hashmi started, Ranveer Singh has reaped, and richly, in full.

But this will also go down as the film which, despite its close clinches, male and female (yesss), its rumpled-bedsheets-andbedroom-antics, gave us a romance that never ignites. The fire between the lovers is restricted to the songs-and-dances; Ranveer and Vaani don’t burn it up.

Part of the seen-it-heard-it before comes from the Yashraj insistence on referencing their own hits. Stitching in a post-palat (Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge) moment with a smart dialogue, and a new-age Farida Jalal moment, doesn’t really make the movie new. You also get a very 500 Days of Summer vibe, in all the backing and forthing.

You can see Vaani trying for more in a few scenes, but she appears stymied for the most part. Better fleshed-out, she could have been a truly spunky here-and-now leading lady, changing her own gears on love and life.

As expected, Ranveer is the life and soul of the party. He has played the brash Dilli boy before, but he games his Dharam enough for us to keep wanting more (the maximum applause is naturally his, and involves a bare body part).

But that thing, oh that thing, between the two people who are looking for forever, failing at it, and finding it — the crucial elements of terrific rom coms — needs more depth. It needs more feeling. It also needs a solid plot.

Which Befikre doesn’t have.