It has not been a good year for movies. Every week brings new hope, which is then systematically taken away by bad writing, acting and direction.
This week, too, there was hope in the form of Ayushmann Khurrana’s Dream Girl and it was sustained with the film’s beginning. However, as the movie progressed, the hope dissipated, making it more of a nightmare.
Khurrana plays Karam, a graduate looking for a job, whose unusual voice sounds convincingly female. Due to this childhood talent, Karam has always been forced to play the female lead in Ram Kathas. He lives with his father (Annu Kapoor), a devout man, and spends most of his time with his best friend, Smiley (Manjot Singh).
After being rejected by almost every potential employer, Karam stumbles upon a ‘friendship’ call centre — a place where lonely men call to chat with women. Given his excellent voiceover skills, he gets a job pretending to be ‘Pooja’ over the phone.
While everything goes swimmingly at first, things take a turn for the alarming when his clients start getting a little too attached.
A fun beginning but a lazy end
Directed and written by Raaj Shaandilyaa, Dream Girl starts out great. The writing is tight, peppered with witty lines and funny scenes. Khurrana, Kapoor, Singh and the inimitable Vijay Raaz deliver top-notch performances with excellent timing — especially Raaz, who is no stranger to effortless comedy.
Hilarious one-liners and witty puns inspire more than a few chuckles. The story, although not substantial, is built up nicely and keeps you hooked till the interval.
The second half, however, leaves you convinced that the writers must have been replaced in some sort of weird relay race because they really did not know what to do with the film after a point.
The film starts to drag, and the humour becomes cringe-worthy and borderline inappropriate as it progresses. The ending is too dramatic and not in a fun, ironic way.
Missed opportunity
The filmmakers also lost out on a great opportunity to bust myths about toxic masculinity and gender fluidity. Karam, in fact, dresses up as a woman and faces the world of men in a romantic context.
Unfortunately, passing references to patriarchal entitlement and the sexism that plagues the dating world is all we get.
Nushrat Bharucha is forgettable as the female lead and so is the music. The direction also gets increasingly sloppy toward the end. What started out as a knee-slapping, laugh-out-loud comedy ends with a half-hearted and misguided speech from the protagonist and a groan from the audience.