#Yaaram
Starring Prateik Babbar, Siddhanth Kapoor, Ishita Raj Sharma
Directed by Ovais Khan
Every actor in this romp-com (and I do mean, romp-com) over-acts. And that includes veterans Dalip Tahil and the long-time-no-see Anita Raj playing the hero Prateik’s forever-argmentative parents.
Tahil gets to shut his jabbering wife long enough to sprout these words of wisdom on human relationships. “Love is not about conquest. It’s about letting go.”
The two heroes, Prateik and Siddhanth, talented and subtle otherwise, are shrill to the point of being annoying. But that could have something to do with the sketchy characters they play. (Babbar) and Saahil(Kapoor) are shallow versions of Prateik’s father Raj Babbar and Deepak Parasher in B R Chopra’s Nikaah.
Like the earlier twosome this one too comes to a breakingpoint when Saahil “accidently” blurts out the terrible ‘T’ word to his wife Zoya (Ishita Raj Sharma) in a fit of rage and then whining in repentance, pleads with his best friend to marry his ex-wife so he can re-marry her.
The mind boggles at the sheer stupidity of the two friends’ plan. By the time the great showdown and revelation at the climax happens we can only hope that the two friends marry one another. They deserve one another. The girl in this preposterous triangle deserves better.
Cutting through the customized idiocy that manoeuvres the triangle, there is some scenic Mauritian landscape to savour. And a surprisingly evocative breakup song that actor Siddhanth Kapoor sings with the end-credits.
This, perhaps, is the only reason why one would like to sit to the end of the film.
As for how the triangle is resolved, here is a hint. This film function strictly by the clichés of love triangles. Don’t expect surprises, expect only the obvious. Speaking of which, there is a sequence where the two friends, one married and happy, the other divorced and unhappy go to the drugstore . One asks for sleeping pills and the other for condoms.
No prizes for guessing which one asks for which.
Though the effort to make light of a cultural-religious aberration is admirable the narrative tends to get carried away sinking to an embarrassing level of skittishness. In one particularly embarrassing sequence the giggly Muslim friend points a scissors at his Hindu friend and says, “Now that you are about to be converted you might need this.”
Okay then.
Finally Hashtag Yaaram becomes quite a family affair with Siddhanth’s father Shakti Kapoor popping up to tell us about the evils of the Triple Talaaq system and how a certain brave prime minister did away with it thereby making thousands of Muslim women happy.
There should be a way for lawfully avoiding films that make the audience unhappy.
