Review: BEFIKRE

Hornier Than DDLJ, Soulless too.

2.5 stars

Mini Review:

Stand up comic Dharm lands in Paris and meets the Paris tour guide Shyra and there’s instant attraction. Since neither believes in the usual kind of love, they live together and their relationship is based on dares and lust. When a lad begins to woo Shyra the old fashioned way, will Dharm realise that Shyra and he are not just buddies, but in love with each other?

Main Review:

Ranveer Singh is simply like the Energiser bunny. He eats up every frame with his screen presence and thankfully he knows how to emote as well.

His co-star, alas is all mouth and chin. That said, let us look at what makes Befikre a poor cousin to Aditya Chopra’s fabulous storytelling in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (DDLJ as we nickname it out of love). It’s fun and frothy, this Befikre, but the lust story loses steam rather quickly and the first half of the film begins to look and taste like Champagne that has lost its fizz.

We know kisses and lust and making out in the city of love, but there’s only so much you can take of ‘I dare you to slap the policeman and then I will date you’, ‘I dare you to strip and dance on the tables at the public library and then I’ll go out with you’... And once you’ve seen the two strip on the way to the bed, kissing fervently, you find yourself saying, ‘Fine, we get it. Move on, now!’ The story seems to just stagnate between ‘One Year Ago’ and ‘Present Day’.

It’s the second half of the film that makes you wish the silly, hormonal first half had not existed. It’s the main course of romance, and we know that the studio excels in the genre. A young man - the quintessential good guy: banker Anay - shows up to woo Shyra, becomes the awesome third wheel, slowly edging out Dharm from the equation. The telephone scene followed by karaoke, followed by the off-key singing on the way back home is simply brilliantly done. You want to call up your best friends and go out for karaoke as soon as possible. You begin to believe Dharm and Shyra are going to be truly new age romantics.

Shyra’s parents add that much needed soul to the show, and you wish they had consulted one or more stand up comics that are doing really well. Ranveer’s comedy comes across as really lame (lingo this gen uses!).

Befikre makes you glad Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge is still playing at a theater in Bombay for over 1100 weeks. Because we want the hero and the heroine to get hitched the old fashioned way. We want love to triumph over lust. It does, but in the worst possible church wedding brawl ever. Even Singh Is King had a wedding brawl between rival gangsters, but it was fun. This one is plain awful and uncomfortable. I was rooting for the two love birds when they met at night (watched The Romantics starring Katie Holmes and Anna Paquin?) and discussed how he needed to face the truth… And then they have a church wedding and there’s an ugly brawl (Go home and watch Four Weddings And A Funeral to get over that ugly scene). Thankfully you know the film is going to end soon. It doesn’t. Not before it gives you a horrible homily about how love is like bungee jumping. You don’t want to know. You are suddenly missing the scene where bua from DDLJ is buying herself a shaadi saree and Shah Rukh is telling her which one to pick… Befikre is hornier than DDLJ could ever be, and that’s fine, but it needed a little bit more soul.  

(this review appears on nowrunning dot com)