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Release
date:
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November 10, 2017
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Director:
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Tanuja Chandra
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Cast:
Language:
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Parvathy, Irrfan,
Siddharth Menon, Pushtiie Shakti, Neha Dhupia, Luke Kenny, Isha Sharvani, Navneet
Nishan, Brijendra Kala
Hindi (with a few
Malayalam lines)
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A conservative young woman,
widowed early in life and hanging on to the memory of her late husband, spends
years allowing life to revolve around work and married friends who take her for
granted. On a whim one day, she puts up her profile on a dating website. Jaya Shashidharan
(played by Parvathy) is a successful insurance professional staying alone in
her Mumbai flat while her younger brother – the only person she seems truly
close to – studies abroad. She meets poet cum inventor Yogendra Kumar
Dhirendranath Prajapati a.k.a. Yogi (Irrfan) via the site. On another whim, she
decides to go on a cross-country trip with him to meet his ex-girlfriends and
check if they still carry a torch for him as he claims they do.
(Possible
spoilers ahead)
No one is more surprised by her
uncharacteristic impetuousness than she herself. Dating is not her scene. It is
clear that at some sub-conscious level she wants to break free of her own
sobriety, but it is an old habit that is hard to shake off. Her confusion over
her life-long sedateness can be the only explanation for why she takes off on a
journey with a virtual stranger and takes other risks in this story that even the
average adventurous Indian woman would not. It also explains why she spends so much
of this expedition regretting being on it. Yogi is everything she is not – unguarded,
sure of what he wants, speaking his mind, constantly laughing at his own poor
jokes, so sociable that even a ride on the wrong train turns into a fun diversion.
She has the appearance of knowing her mind, but does not. She says one thing,
while her heart wants something else.
Most of what I have told you is
already contained in the trailer of Qarib
Qarib Singlle (Almost Single). Despite the sense of humour in some of the
couple’s initial interactions, and the undoubted charisma of the lead stars, the
film does not have much more to offer beyond the pleasures of that trailer. There
is a kernel of an idea in there that could have been taken somewhere, but it
does not come together as a cohesive, credible whole.
Froth and frolic notwithstanding,
writer-director Tanuja Chandra makes a point here, although it is unclear
whether that was her intention. In one scene, Yogi half-mockingly expresses
admiration for Jaya’s feminism. Yet, the song and dance that is made about her
lack of clarity regarding what she wants from him, treads the well-worn path of
suggesting that behind all their bluster, there is nothing more that female
feminists want than the comfort of tradition and a man. This silly stereotypical
belief is implied and stated routinely in real life by those whose superficial
understanding is that men and relationships with men are, theoretically, anathema
to women feminists.
It is possible that Chandra did
not intend to insinuate any of this, but the clichéd characterisation of Jaya
and Yogi, no different from a standard Mills & Boon romance, ends up doing
precisely that – not spelt out in black and white, but by implication.
Besides, Qarib Qarib Singlle’s lead actors Parvathy and Irrfan do not click
as a couple on screen. It does not help that this supposedly off-mainstream
film from a seemingly thinking filmmaker displays the same ageist sexism that
we see in hard-core commercial Hindi cinema, in which 50-something male stars
routinely play younger men and star with women half their age. The Net tells me
that Irrfan is 50 and that baby-faced, chubby-cheeked Parvathy is 29, but in
the film, Yogi is 40 (really?) while Jaya is 35 – an adjustment that has
obviously been made to justify the casting. I guess it would be too much to ask
this gender-prejudiced industry to pick a 40 to 50-year-old woman for a
50-year-old man, but Qarib Qarib Singlle
would have been another film, and very likely a far more interesting one, if
Chandra had gone down that path.
If Irrfan hit it off beautifully with
Nimrat Kaur in The Lunchbox despite
their age gap, it was because the film made no bones about being an
older-man-younger-woman romance. If there were sparks between him and Deepika
Padukone in Piku despite their evidently
contrasting personalities, it was because their characters were positioned as
an odd couple who were brought together by circumstances not of their choice,
unlike here. Parvathy’s Jaya does not come across as a person who would naturally
take to Irrfan’s Yogi, not merely because he is considerably older (although
that would be a factor), not merely because they are chalk and cheese (though
that may be a factor too), but especially considering that some of his
behaviour towards her at first is creepy in its intrusiveness – the way he sneaks
a peek at one of her online passwords at their maiden encounter, the manner in
which he procures her cell number. Yet, before we can buy into their awkward
pairing, they are off on the road together. It is all meant to be very cool and
modern of course, it is just not convincing – more the sort of stuff too many married
folk think all singletons do, too many older people think all youngsters do,
and those who are not sure of their own cool quotient think cool people do.
On the technical front, considering
that it is a road film, Qarib Qarib
Singlle (QQS) fails to fully cash
in on the picturesque locations it travels through, including Rishikesh and
Gangtok, a stretch on the heritage train Fairy Queen and later on the Ganga. Must
you dwarf the splendour around your protagonists to maintain a focus on them? A
word of praise for two other departments though: Parvathy’s hair and make-up
artist Ridhima Sharma has highlighted the actor’s prettiness without dolling
her up; while Maria Tharakan and Kirti Kolwankar keep Jaya’s wardrobe
attractive in a muted fashion even as they jazz up Yogi to amusing effect
without turning him into a cartoon.
On the final balance sheet then, QQS is fun in bits and pieces mostly in
the first half, but conflicted about what it wants to say and, therefore, tedious
beyond a point. Parvathy – one of Mollywood’s most respected artistes, who has notched
up a triumph in Take Off just this
year – makes her Bollywood debut with this film. The wonderful-as-always Irrfan
has the advantage of a colourful character here, but Parvathy, playing the
comparatively dull Jaya, sinks her teeth into the role and delivers a
performance that is worthy of way more than the written material at hand. A salaam
too to her fluency in a language far removed from her mother tongue – she speaks Hindi with ease and a charming trace of a Malayalam accent, the effect
enhanced by the hilarious smattering of Malayalam words that dialogue writer
Gazal Dhaliwal has woven into Jaya’s lines.
Individually, Parvathy and Irrfan
are sweet in QQS. Sadly, that is not
enough.
Rating
(out of five stars): *1/2
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CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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125 minutes 28 seconds
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This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qarib_Qarib_Singlle
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