An absurd love story

Johnson Thomas

Love sees no reason and that’s what Bollywood filmmakers hope to exploit in their attempts to sing a different tune with every romance. Scripted by Suresh Nair and Ritesh Shah, this weird love story has a happily married couple playing musical chairs with their love just so that she can escape the regressive customs of her family in Amritsar. 

Param (Arjun Kapoor) and Jasmeet (Parineeti Chopra) fall in love at first sight at a wedding reception and meet secretly throughout their courtship before convincing her rigid, old-fashioned Daaji about the acceptability of their suit. She is a wannabe jewellery designer, he an agriculturist. He is content to stay close to his home while she wants to work - but a promise to her Daaji as part of the condition before accepting Param’s suit prevents her from working.

Such woebegone mechanisms to create hurdles in love are being resurrected once again. It’s a regression of sorts and Bollywood appears to have run out of ideas to advance the romance genre. With a weakened reasoning and little else to take the plot further, it was to be expected that the couple would find themselves in England fighting to save their love and marriage from the exploitative greed of ambition. The narrative, in fact, goes to ridiculous and unbelievable lengths to create distance between the couple. Despite being married, Jasmeet fakes a wedding with Samir (Aditya Seal) who is in it to con his dying grandfather (Vinod Nagpal). To reel his wife back into his ever open arms, Param becomes an illegal immigrant and enjoys a faux romance with Ayesha. By omitting mention of legal authorities dealing with immigration and marriage, the writers make it easier for the couple to move to England without much resistance.

Visas are sought and rejected as swift as the spoken word. There’s this character called Gurnaam Singh Visa (Satish Kaushik) who specialises in getting people across borders and seas, through illegal means. And a visit to his shady shindig usually does the trick. Granted that Punjab is famous for the high number of illegal immigrants to western shores but I am pretty sure that it’s not so easy. Such fake representations in films catering to the cinema-going audience have the power to corrupt mindsets. Thankfully Vipul Shah’s sequel to his Namaste London is so silly that it’s unlikely to make a dent at the box office. There’s no story to tell, the plot is so thin as to be non-existent and the dialogues are so repetitive as to be absurd. Lackluster music, song, and dance barges in every few minutes but it just ratchets up the tedium. Arjun Kapoor and Parineeti Chopra fail to impress. Can’t blame them, though. This is so off-putting that even their affable presence fails to raise interest!