Movie Review:Cocktail

Garnished with a vibrant musical score, some spry dialogue, a dash of humour and fine acting all around, Cocktail is an inviting concoction that retains its off-the-wall flavor all the way through.

Despite a somewhat sluggish second half, Homi Adajania’s first Hindi-language film proves that Being Cyrus was no flash in the pan.

Though there is absolutely no common ground between the two films made seven years apart, barring lead actor Saif Ali Khan, Dimple Kapadia and Boman Irani, it is quite evident that the director possesses a sensibility that borders on the idiosyncratic in an intriguing sort of way and the hiatus has not dulled its edges.  

Adajania plays a refreshingly bright little game with the romcom genre although the building tools and the nuts and bolts he employs are pretty much from the same warehouse. The result is, on the whole, pretty watchable.

Three characters – Gautam (Saif Ali Khan), a philandering smarty pants who flirts with every girl in sight; Veronica (Deepika Padukone), a footloose and fancy-free London girl who lives life on her terms; and Meera (debutante Diana Penty), a fresh-faced, sedate, just-off-the-boat lass who has been ditched by her newly wedded hubby in a new city – share the same apartment.

The coquette loves the flirt, but the flirt falls for the coy lass. “Test drive mere saath aur ghar le jao mere best friend ko,” quips Veronica in a moment of weakness after she learns that Meera has actually beaten her to Gautam’s heart.

After the fun and games of the first half, livened up by the presence of Dimple and Boman, there is a whole lot of drama in the second as the three friends turn really serious about their feelings for each other.

Veronica puts up a brave front even as she smarts deep down, a remorseful Meera walks out of the house, and Gautam realizes that the latter is the girl he really loves and wants to marry.

Cocktail has all the standard ingredients of a romantic comedy. But, thanks to the by and large realistic treatment of the material, it keeps the threat of staleness at bay.   

Coming off the middling showing in Agent Vinod, Saif gets into the city slicker groove quickly and brings the house down and shocks his on-screen mother (played by Dimple Kapadia) no end by slipping into drags and swaying to his version of Sheela ki jawani.
Deepika Padukone, playing a vivacious but vulnerable girl who values her freedom more than anything else, articulates the loneliness of rebellion without resorting to the usual “taming of the shrew” tropes. Diana Penty, the sedate one, serves as a perfect foil to the effervescence of her temperamental antithesis.                    

What sets Cocktail apart from Hindi romcoms that have gone before is its defiant streak of lightheartedness. The narrative never puts too fine a point on the behavioural transgressions of the characters and refrains from making value judgments.

“I have never seen a man like Gautam,” Veronica tells Meera when she realizes that she is about to lose him, “and trust me I’ve seen many.” Nobody bats an eyelid.

Adajania repeatedly pokes fun at Bollywood’s tendency to embrace excess as a necessary narrative device. Gautam playfully reprimands Meera for getting into “Shakuntala mode” after the duo’s first kiss on a Cape Town beach.

In another sequence, Veronica asks her gal pal: “Aur thoda melodrama ka scope hain?” Obviously not.

Adajania, on his part, pulls the strings back every time draws the going threatens to take a mawkish turn. He does it frequently enough to prove that it is anything but the result of a fluke.