Film review: Bollywood latest Phillauri fails to deliver any soul or audience connection

You want to get involved with the characters and cheer them on, but the plot is simply too contrived to allow for any real connection or tender feelings to develop between the film and its viewers.

 Phillauri is in cinemas now. CourtesyFox Star Studios
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Phillauri

Cast: Anushka Sharma, Diljit Dosanjh, Suraj Sharma, Mehreen Pirzada

Director: Anshai Lal

2.5 stars

Phillauri has potential, and it has the audience's goodwill — its lead actress, Anushka Sharma, is currently the nation's sweetheart and is being lauded for making the courageous choice of producing films from small towns with a local flavour — and yet, the film manages to delight only in fragmented parts.

You want to get involved with the characters and cheer them on, but the plot is simply too contrived to allow for any real connection or tender feelings to develop between the film and its viewers.

The directorial debut of Anshai Lal, Phillauri is a movie about two love stories, set about a century apart.

Kanan (Suraj Sharma), a charming but silly non-resident Indian (NRI) from Canada, flies down to Amritsar to tie the knot with his excited high-school sweetheart, Anu (Mehreen Pirzada).

Unfortunately, Kanan is Manglik, a Hindu astrological situation that predicts doom for the couple. As a solution, he’s married off to an auspicious tree amid prayers and chants.

While it might sound strange, this is a fairly common solution to this widely held superstition among Hindus in India.

As luck would have it, the tree is inhabited by Shashi (Anushka Sharma), a friendly, wide-eyed, incandescent ghost, and now that Kanan has married the tree and it’s been razed to the ground, she’s bound to him.

As far as concepts go, it is a novel one for a romantic film in Bollywood. Frustratingly, though, the director and writers fail to capitalise on the novelty in a meaningful way. The movie shuffles backwards and forwards between Kanan and Anu’s love story in the present and Shashi’s love story with Phillauri (Diljit Dosanjh) in pre-Independence India.

The present is rife with stereotypes about the big Punjabi wedding — the spirits freely, the family is obscenely loud and, of course, there is that one spunky grandma who guzzles like a pro and dispenses life advice that makes you chuckle. And, there are the mandatory laughs to be had from the ghost’s invisibility. It’s all there.

But without Shashi and Phillauri’s love story there is little soul in this movie. It unfolds slowly, sometimes too slowly, but beautifully. Shashi is the dutiful sister of a doctor who toes the line in public and believes that women from respectable families don’t indulge in frivolous pursuits like music and dance, but secretly writes poetry. Phillauri is a directionless, local singer who finds himself in love with a woman completely unlike himself. Both change for each other, even as she writes and he puts music to her poetry.

One could have lived with the slow, languishing pace of the film and come away with mostly nice things to say about Phillauri, if it hadn't been for the last 20 minutes of the film. The gimmicky climax just too much.

It’s a shame that a much-anticipated film with fairly decent performances — Sharma is reliable, Peerzada shows real flair, and Anushka and Dosanjh manage to take the thin plot and choppy direction and turn into something half-decent — can, at best, be described as a one-time watch if you really have nothing more interesting to do.

artslife@thenational.ae