Review of Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, a 2013 Bollywood film by Ayan Mukherjee starring Ranbir Kapoor
‘Yeh Jawaani Hai Ghissi Pitti’, ‘Yeh Jawaani Hai Puraani’, ‘Yeh Jawaani Nahi, Bachpanaa Hai’ or ‘Wake Up Sid (Hangover Version)’ could easily become alternative titles for ‘Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani’… no , let me change that up a bit: more suitable titles for Ayan Mukherjee’s sophomore effort… no, not really an effort, more of an attempt at direction.
He serves you cold soup this time and that’s not the worst, he also serves you the same soup. With a heavy-handed deal; It feels like the lunch lady at your college canteen made the soup. That’s how lazy Ayan Mukherjee is this time: his story is hackneyed, his dialogues are stale, his characters are hackneyed, his situations are clichés, and his decisions are boring. This guy seriously needs to get out of this ‘follow your dreams’ ’embrace change’ ‘set your head’ phase; yes, he got the chance to play him in ‘Wake Up Sid’ and he did well, but this is pure directorial torpor.
The deconstruction of the plot of Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani will begin with a cliché: it is about four young friends. Oh, a breather: two are boys and two are girls, so it’s not the ‘guy flick’ or the ‘chick flick’. This movie begins with one of the girls reminiscing about her past, while the other is about to get married. The girl she narrates is Naina Talwar (Deepika Padukone), and she takes us eight years into the past, when she was the studious, plain Jane, good girl Naina. And since all good studious girls need glasses, she puts one on. She still looks hot but since she is Bollywood and the shows are equal to ‘behenji or nerd’ our Naina is totally ignored by guys.
She’s at the supermarket with her snobbish mom, shopping in her little skirt/shorts (she’s showing legs anyway, but no one notices because she has ‘shows’). He hears someone yell near the checkout counter; it is Aditi, the former schoolmate of hers. Aditi is angry with a burly boy who was looking at her legs (according to her). He tells her that she’s not that hot, she gets angrier. Naina approaches her, they greet each other, Naina’s mother talks about her daughter, Aditi praises Naina for being a ‘padhaku’ type and then tells of her trip to Manali. The scene ends with Naina being secretly invited by her to her trip.
Next scene at the dining room table. Naina’s mom insults Aditi for being the ‘bad girl’. Naina throws a tantrum with ‘I want a vacation’ and then gets up from the table. Next, we see her visiting the Make My Trip site, probably co-sponsors of this movie because they’re everywhere! Our brave girl Naina runs away the next day and joins Aditi for the trip, but Aditi is not alone, she is with Bunny and Avi.
We’ve already been introduced to these two guys: Bunny is the photographer who dreams of traveling the world (for some reason Ayan can’t think outside the box; Ranbir Kapoor in Wake Up Sid = photographer, Ranbir Kapoor in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani = photographer) while Avi is an alcoholic who loses a lot gambling (I have no idea how he gets the money). First we find Bunny in a brothel filming with a foreign crew about prostitutes; so there’s the usual ‘spicy talk’ with the prostitute, then a totally aimless dance number with Madhuri Dixit. But we know why it was added: it’s a Karan Johar production, he was a judge with Dixit on a dance reality show, he must have thought it appropriate to randomly place her in a dance number that has NOTHING to do with anything. She does look lovely though, and her dancing is sensual and expressive, but why the hell (or why in a brothel of all places) is she there?
So, Bunny is the photographer who calls his stepmother ‘stepmom’ (ridiculous and childish, why not the first name?), Avi is the alcoholic faltu (useless), Avi is the cool girl, and Naina is the ‘erudite’ . They all board the train to Manali, their trip being sponsored by MAKE MY TRIP (they could have made all four of them break the fourth wall and yell “I love Make My Trip!”). They meet hot girls, and Bunny has a crush on one of them named Lara, a sexy but ditzy girl like you see in all the other college movies; the girl actually has background music whenever she is on the screen and she is so childish that your brain feels ashamed that it gifted you the power to hear these sounds. Okay, on the trip, our Naina relaxes (wears glasses and voila, she becomes a crazy hot babe in a day), starts enjoying life (gets drunk. Don’t tell her fussy mom) and he falls in love with Bunny, who is commitment-phobic. There’s a scene where both Naina and Bunny are screaming from the edge of a hill and you really want them to slip and fall and die for the movie to blow us away.
The movie never surprises us. Our hero Bunny leaves for USA after the trip, Naina becomes Aditi’s best friend, Aditi decides to marry a chubby guy named Taran after Avi doesn’t reciprocate her feelings for him, while Avi he’s still a drunk and in big debt. The second half is more embarrassing and most of it revolves around Aditi’s marriage. Random characters come and go and we’re bound to laugh (we don’t, not once). There are the ‘serious scenes from the buddy movie’ that we don’t care about; It’s a bunch of cliché-filled banal moments you’d find on Facebook, written by guys and girls with an IQ of 100 who just think their shitty thoughts are deep.
One thing I noticed in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, which I’ve noticed quite a bit in other commercial Bollywood movies, but didn’t bother to report, is the lack of spontaneity between the actors. Take the scene where Deepika and Ranbir are alone in the camp and she can’t resist him; she holds her hands even after the conversation ends.
To show this, Ranbir has a dialogue ‘Then why are you still holding my hand?’, which then reveals her hand holding his. Wouldn’t it have been better to frame the two characters from a distance and show her spontaneously holding her hands and not letting go? It was a joy to watch Meryl Streep and Eastwood fall in love in Bridges of Madison County because they both responded slowly without the need for any gestures or mechanical movements. However, Bollywood thrives on mechanical movements that just feel fake.
Deepika is more than tolerable as the nerdy woman, but her character is so easily transformed into a beauty queen just based on the horrible idea that wearing glasses makes you nerdy. Ranbir is a method actor and I really wonder what he thought about the randomly inserted dance numbers: he never asked Ayan why his character could dance and sing like a pro? Or probably his bank account was so overloaded with Johar’s money that he ignored everything else. Kalki and Aditya Roy Kapur are passable in their poorly written roles.
This type of film that mints a hundred crores at the box office is pure criminality. Please don’t encourage Ayan Mukherjee to make more like these! Stop Johar from making money like this!
And reconsider your Make My Trip subscription if you have one: they’ll take you to Kashmir, calling it Manali! (in case you were wondering, Omar Abdullah accused the filmmakers of shooting in Kashmir and then considering it Manali in the film)