There are bad films. Then there are bad films masquerading as works of art. Hamari Adhuri Kahani exposes Mohit Suri to be a shallow and superficial director who scratches the glossy surface of living-room relationships to reveal more of the creator’s own spiritual emptiness rather than the angst of his troubled characters.
Vidya Balan playing the doormat wife who we mercifully thought was gone with Meena Kumari, raves rants and sheds tears at the drop of every musical note like a newly-tuned violin that wants to show off its range.Emraan Hashmi as her Perfect Saviour tries to look intense and involved. Instead he appears bewildered to be in a romance that doesn’t have a proper kiss. Rajkummar Rao as the brutish husband is blessedly in character. He can’t save a film that’s hellbent on being disastrously outdated and shockingly conservative about a wife’s right to self-hood. Is this reactionary raga of long-suffering womanhood actually written by Mahesh Bhatt who 30 years ago showed the housewife the exit door from a bad marriage in Arth?
Vidya Balan seems to belong to the stone age. And that’s where the film belongs, What were the makers thinking ? What were they smoking? Ek Adhuri Kahani is to the romantic genre what Bombay Velvet was to the gangster genre.
Most offensive of all is the narrative’s garbled notion of cinematic emotion. Every frame seems to scream for attention.
Moht Suri has never been known for his subtle skills of storytelling. Here, he throws all caution to the winds exposing his characters as wimpy whiny unlikeable stereotypes burning in the half baked fire of their own angst.
We’ve seen this sort of a hero in Suri’s Aashiqui 2(Aditya Roy Kapoor) and Ek Villain(Siddharth Malhotra). Now it’s Vidya Balan’s turn. She appears to be as out of sync with modernday reality as a harp that plays in a pub filled with rowdy drinkers.
Surprisingly, for a Mohit Suri film, the songs do not create that swell in the heart which Kalyug and Aashiqui 2.All we feel is annoying sense of deja vu as the tangled triangle plays out its corny karma.
Who talks behaves and responds in this way in today’s day and homage?
Vidya Balan has gone in record to say she was inspired by Shabana Azmi in Arth.
Maybe the director should have sought inspiration from Mahesh Bhatt’s early films rather than the high-pitched Eka Kapoor serials.
An epic disaster.
