Ekk Deewana Tha Director: Gautham Vasudev Menon Cast: Prateik, Amy Jackson, Manu Rishi, Sachin Khedekar

A model-turned-actress from Liverpool is cast as a 23-year-old Malayali Christian girl from alluring Alappuzha who has spent all her life in madding Mumbai. Neither the colour of her skin nor her dubbed diction is quite in sync with reality. Both fluctuate wildly from one sequence to another. Warped as hell!

There is much else that is amiss in Ekk Deewana Tha, not the least of which is the fact that the film has been helmed by a National Award-winning director (Gautham Vasudev Menon) who is clearly not at home in the conventions of Hindi-language cinema.

Menon, of Minnale fame, enjoys quite a reputation down south as a skilled purveyor of young romance. What worked rather famously in the Tamil original (Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa), in which the young male protagonist was a Hindu boy from Chennai and his reluctant lady love a Catholic girl from Kerala, comes completely unstuck in this pan-Indian, caught-in-no-man’s-land remake.

The cultural disjunctions are jarring and the walk-on Malayali characters in the mix are reduced to disorienting caricatures.

That apart, the pace of Ekk Deewana Tha is sluggish; the flush of first love isn’t half as intense as it ideally should be for a film of this genre to work; the dialogues (penned by actor Manu Rishi, who also has a significant on-screen role) border on the corny; and the performances never rise above the humdrum.

In a generous mood, one might say Ekk Deewana Tha is a well-meaning effort lost in translation.

The core of the film is rather regressive. Which Catholic family in 21st century India would regard cinema as sinful?

A disdain for the movies is the central premise in the film. The heroine’s ultra-conservative dad – who one may safely presume has lived in Mumbai for 23 years, if not more – does not know who Amitabh Bachchan is despite owning a property a few plots away from the megastar’s home.

His somewhat stuffy daughter, on the other hand, has no awareness of the existence of Mohanlal in the Kerala cultural landscape. But she does pipe up to assert that her home state isn’t merely a land of “toddy and Mohanlal”.

IT pro Jessie Joseph (Amy Jackson), tells her Marathi Brahmin neighbour, Sachin (Prateik), a 22-year-old mechanical engineer who has been hired by Ramesh Sippy (in a special appearance) as an assistant, that she has seen only five movies to date.

This is a love story bereft of passion – the lovey-dovey duo has no chemistry whatsoever. They are stuck up about the innocuous acts that constitute youthful PDA – a suggestive touch, a warm hug or a tentative kiss. Instead, all they talk about are holy matrimony and how the girl’s family might react to the proposition. What a crushing bore!

The hero repeatedly intones that he is “crazy” about Jessie. But Jessie does not reciprocate the ardour. She whimpers: I love you, I love you not; I will marry you, I will marry you not. The refrain runs all through this flimsy film until it goes hopelessly comatose.

Jessie – the way the hero addresses her, it sounds more like Jassi – is draped in the whole nine yards and goes to bed with the boy she loves only after she has formally exchanged marital vows. She’s God-fearing, family-loving and chastity personified.

Come on Miss Spotless, the world has moved on. Marriage is certainly an important piece of paper, but for those that are madly in love it cannot be an all-consuming pursuit.

In this off-colour romantic drama, even AR Rahman – the film is studded to breaking point with his compositions – sounds inexplicably listless. Not that the songs aren’t hummable. It’s the rest of the film – there isn’t much to it anyway – that weighs them down. The viewer is in the same marooned boat. Jump off!