Hasee Toh Phasee

                                                           

There was a boy and there was a girl and there was the fiancée. Of late, all “different” plots in Bollywood seem to be hatched around those lines, having successfully trivialized the entire sequence beyond salvation.
In Hasee Toh Phasee, director Vinil Matthew has the ammunition, but doesn’t know how to use it right.
 He has KJo and Anurag Kashyap’s backing, a quirky love story, some clever repartees and a scientist heroine who makes a first appearance in short-hair and boys’ clothes (oh wow!), leading the audience to think this will be a good investment of time and money. But then it all comes apart.
Twenty minutes into the movie the viewers realize all those devices are just there for the  sake of being in there, the movie is essentially the same ghisa-pita love triangle that only pretends to be different.
Meeta (Parineeti Chopra) is the  prodigious scientist who has an addiction problem.  That’s about all that is fresh in the movie.  Chopra, given that disarming manner in which she makes dialogues come across as real conversations,  does  a pretty good job of being the weird,  non-glamorous heroine. But that alone cannot save a movie and you know a movie has not been saved when the entire theatre is distracted—guessing passwords, checking out Bombay locales and the color palette of the costumes – instead of following the story line.
Shout-out to the costume designers here. The decision to repeat Chopra’s clothes was a sound one, a step towards being realistic. Also, good job in not going totally over the top with the backless cholis.


Nikhil (Sidharth Malhotra) is the male lead. Two things here: if you’re sharing screen space with the younger Chopra, you should know there’s a very good chance she’ll overshadow you. When you walk into a project with that understanding, it helps if you don’t distract your audience further by not buttoning up your shirt. Malhotra stubbornly refuses to button up, is made to dance to lyrics that go “yippee, I’m a Hippee”, and thanks to a story line that gets lost,  is the weak man who is shoved from fiancée to girlfriend to fiancée and back till we get exasperated and want to grab him by the shoulder and shake him up. Bad deal.

The rom aspect of the rom-com is palatable. I mean, it is a romance. There is a nice song or two, there are likeable male and female leads. But then comes trouble. In his pursuit to be different, the director brings in the “no sappy love but quirky exchange” expectation, but fails to deliver.
So the much-hyped scientist heroine becomes a sham :  it would not hurt the story one bit if she were a dancer or a magician.  Chopra should be careful of these traps—a couple of more movies in the same way and she’ll be dangerously close to singing and dancing next to Salman Khan’s Bihari cop soon.
But for now, she’s the best part of this movie and well deserves all the accolades she’s getting for somehow getting the audience to connect with a character that has not been well sketched, nor shows a lot of emotion.

The love triangle complications, as I already said, have been so overdone, the writers forget where to draw the line. Granted, all the world loves a lover, but when said lover is chasing the sister of his fiancée at the wedding venue itself,  you begin to wonder.  Adah Sharma as the fiancée-sister is completely replaceable with any of the many “great-figure-and-skin-no-acting-skills-whatsovers running a dime a dozen in Bollywood today. When that character -- someone who is already not making an impact of the audience -- is made to somehow go ahead to get married even after she is made aware of  her groom’s love for her own sister (even writing that down makes me wince a little) , you are with the audience when they go “what the hell?!”

The com part of the rom-com works in bits. The CID/Daya reference is funny, but the Priyadarshanesque chase in the middle of a bazaar is an ordeal.  The more serious scenes fall flat, largely because the viewer cannot decide whether to treat the movie as fun and fluff, or look for more layers. So Meeta wets her saree, but you don’t really feel her pain because in the next moment, she’s onto some Bollywood-ish trick that mars the effect of what could be a very touching scene.
There’s also my steady gripe against directors: only someone who takes his audience to be very stupid would come up with a hacking scene of the kind they show in the movie. Hand drawn flowcharts, really?  It’s a disgrace, though the supporting actor is endearing, at times more than the male lead.

Beneath the veneer of being realistic, Hasee Toh Phasee is the run of the mill Bollywood candy floss. So in the end, order is restored in the universe, love wins and money matters are resolved.  Then in keeping with current tradition, there’s a song and dance attached to the movie at the end, and it does the trick. By the time you've collected your shoes, coats, bags and empty chips boxes, all you remember is the peppy beats from the song, and it is time to head home.