Review: DHADAK

Dhadak Has No Pulse!

2 stars

Mini Review:

A vanilla remake of the hard-hitting Marathi film Sairat,

Dhadak is just an overly long story about a runaway couple.

While Sairat was raw and gritty, the caste divide between

the lovers very obvious and cruel, here it gets a makeover.

The first half has a romance made tolerable because of the

lad Ishaan Khattar, but the second half is like the girl (Janhvi

Kapoor) annoying and unable to get out of a scene intact.

Main Review:

How delightful is the boy Ishaan Khattar! You saw him shine in

Majid Majidi’s disastrous Bombay story, Beyond The Clouds, and

now here. He is Madhukar here, and we are told by his dad, ‘Stay

away from the girl… They are of different caste… You will be in

trouble…’

The girl is Parthavi, the local politician's daughter sassy and pretty.

She knows the lad has been following her around, and just like

Sairat (set in a small town in Maharashtra), this film too makes the

same mistake. Udaipur is a small town - usually hotbeds of gossip

and telltale folk - and yet no one reports the romance to the rich

dad, not even to curry favor.

Well, the songs by Ajay Atul are sweet but Rajasthani they are not.

The kids are caught kissing and are separated and beaten up and

the girl comes to the police station and at gunpoint drags the lad

away to freedom. Of course they have not thought about the

consequences.

Sairat really got gritty here, and took their penniless state to really

cringe-inducing levels where you could not pop a kernel of the

multiplex popcorn without feeling guilty. But these two runaways

find shelter immediately and then a way out. And yes, the awful

pointless reference to writer director Sachin Bhowmick is

unmissable. Did they not find a different Bengali name? Sachin

Bhowmick wrote way better characters than this film can count.

They needed a vertically challenged Shridhar Watsar who plays the

comic relief Purushottam to ham it out in every scene. Even

Parthavi’s brother (in Sairat, he’s called Prince, even though his

actions are anything but) is a cardboard bad guy. Ashutosh Rana

gets to glare at the camera and his ‘badness’ is unmissable. I wish

they had thought the story through to really adapt to the setting

in Rajasthan.

The end is too long coming. And the iconic slapping scene in

Sairat shows us how poverty and helplessness can dehumanise

anyone and kill the storybook idea of romance, does not shock you

here at all. Anyone else in the lad’s place would have slapped the

boring heroine much earlier. You are relieved to leave the theatre,

hoping the young actress will sign up for acting lessons if she wants

to step into her mother’s shoes (she’s late Sridevi’s daughter). But

Ishaan shines, and you hope he gets better scripts than Dhadak.

There’s no heartbeat here, no pulse. Dhadak just flatlines.  

(This review appears on www.nowrunning.com )