Hey Sinamika(Tamil, Netflix)
Starring Dulquer Salmaan, Aditi Rao Hydari and Kajal Aggarwal
Directed by Brinda
Rating: * 1/2 One and a half stars
Hands-down , this is Dulquer Salman’s career’s lowest-of-the-low blow, so dimwitted and so taken up with being sassy that it forgets to inject some amount of native intelligence to a marital comedy that will put you off Dulquer and marriage , in that order, for keeps.
Is it the character he plays? Or is it the film that is annoying? Dulquer plays an over-talkative busybody and an over-possessive husband who puts his wife to sleep with his sermons on culinary flavours and other trivia.
Dulquer doesn’t have to try hard to irritate the hell out of his wife. So infectious is his penchant for annoyance that we are soon looking for ways to beat down the hero’s yakking .
Once we get the point about Dulquer’s verbal diarrhea, there is nothing more to say. The writer Madhan Karky relies blindly on the Argentinian original (Un Novio Para Mi Mujer.). But the cultural differences get in the way of a smooth-flowing narrative. The movement of the marital mirth from birth to rebirth is heaving spasmodic and. worst of all, uninteresting.
Dulquer and Aditi are strangely awkward with one another, like two strangers in a railway compartment who decide to behave like close friends to drive away the boredom of the long journey.
And the less said about Kajal Aggarwal, the better. She plays a psychologist. But behaves so unprofessionally it seems she is in the business of seduction rather than the responsibility of hearing couples fume over their fractured marriages.
The triangle among Dulquer, Rao aand Aggarwal in the second-half is like tedium in a terror chamber with no exists.
What I like are the comments on house husbandry and on traditional gender roles. These, sadly, are diluted by some hideous compromises: just because a choreographer directs this dunce-special must we have an elaborate quasi-classical number where Rao and Aggarwal twirl and spin like twins in la la land.
Like chewing gum, Hey Sinamika gets more rubbery in flavour as it moves forward laughing at its own jokes but sadly unable to communicate even an iota of the intended humour to the audience.By the time Dulquer and Rao reach the court for a divorce the audience is ready for an out-of-court settlement: tell us this film is a joke, and we promise not to sue for mental torture.
