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Release date:
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June 30, 2017
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Director:
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Suneel Darshan
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Cast:
Language:
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Shiv Darshan,
Natasha Fernandez, Upen Patel
Hindi
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A long long time
ago in the kingdom of clichéd cinema, a rich man’s daughter falls in love with
a poor stable boy. He is killed by her father for that crime. Decades later,
his bhatakti aatma returns to claim
the heart of her granddaughter. We are told the young lady is her naani’s carbon copy and, as fate would
have it, already engaged to her childhood friend at the point she meets the aatma.
What happens
thereafter is not what you might expect, but I am not wasting time getting into
the nitty-gritty of the story because, frankly, that would amount to beating
about the bush. Overriding fact: this film is awful.
It is a romantic
thriller, but no twist in the end, nor even Amarjeet Singh’s slick camerawork
in the picturesque English and Welsh countryside, can compensate for the all-round
godawfulness, the inertness and the dated storytelling that constitute Ek Haseena Thi Ek Deewana Tha.
Producer-director
Suneel Darshan’s latest venture marks the return to Bollywood of music director
Nadeem Saifi, and Darshan’s second attempt at giving his son Shiv an acting
career.
Nadeem’s
compositions for the film are passably melodic while they last, but too generic
to be memorable. The Nadeem who has churned out songs for Ek Haseena Thi EDT is not worthy of the reputation enjoyed by the
man who made the blockbuster music for Aashiqui
and Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin as one
half of Nadeem-Shravan in the 1990s. Like this film, his work too seems stuck
in time.
It speaks volumes about the pathetic quality
of Ek Haseena Thi EDT that the music
is still one of the nicer things about it.
The highlight of
the film’s horrendousness is Shiv, a milky-skinned gentleman whose expressionlessness
resembles the blankness of faces we see these days Botoxed into immobility.
I understand paternal
devotion. I do. But to expose your child’s absolute lack of talent before the
world is not love. There is no kind way of saying this, so I may as well not
mince words: Shiv cannot act.
The only saving
grace for him in this film is that Natasha Fernandez is almost – though not
entirely – as bad. Instead of advertising itself as a film, Ek Haseena Thi EDT should have considered promoting itself as a contest
for dreadful acting between Darshan Junior and Fernandez. Their
co-star Upen Patel is no Robert De Niro, but he comes off looking comparatively
impressive in the presence of these two and made me wonder whether he might
show some spark in a better film.
Pretty Ms Fernandez
struggles to work her facial muscles, poses around (clearly at the behest of
her director) and delivers dialogues in an amusingly strained fashion. Her Hindi diction
is awkward, she even says tukraana
for tthukraana. And director saab did not deem it fit to correct her before
demanding a retake?
Perhaps Darshan was
too busy focusing on getting the wardrobe and makeup departments to package his
heroine to perfection so that she could be draped on his son.
The problem lies
not just in a father prioritising his offspring over all else, but also in this
team’s questionable attitude to women. For instance, the good guy in Ek Haseena Thi EDT is positioned as a
good guy although he thinks nothing of kissing a sleeping woman who does not
know him; and when one man asks another for a birthday gift, the other guy
points to a woman, as though he had purchased her from a shop. Her outburst in
the end, about the right to make her own choices, comes as an obvious afterthought,
inserted there by writers who want to camouflage their narrow-mindedness in a
changing world.
To be fair to
Darshan, although he has enjoyed tremendous commercial success, he has at no
point been viewed as a great artist or a liberal by serious Bollywood gazers.
That said, nothing in his track record is a match for the
vacuity of this film.
Ek Haseena Thi EDT is so terrible, it is
riveting. (Spoiler alert, for those who
still care) It is not a fantasy flick, nor does it belong to the mythical/mythological
genre, yet at one point, a man reveals – with a perfectly straight face – that
after an accident, he prayed to God for a few extra days on Earth and God granted
him 14. What calculation did God make to arrive at that precise figure. Was God
a voice in this fellow’s head? Did s/he appear in flesh and blood? Did they
chat on Skype?
With nothing happening
on screen, I busied myself with these profound questions. I also briefly
considered headlining this review thus: Ek
haseen critic thhi, ek khokhla film thha.
(Moment of silence and introspection.)
Okay, I apologise
for that PJ. I think I am tipsy from the trauma of having watched such a lousy film.
Allow me to sign off before I completely lose my mind. Tata, goodbye and good
luck.
Rating
(out of five stars): -10
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CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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105 minutes
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This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
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