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Thursday, March 27, 2025
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BOLLYWOOD I DON'T LUV U
EDITOR'S PICK
`I
Don`t Luv U` heart not in its theme (IANS Movie Review)
Rating: ***
The trouble with a well-meaning film such as this is it cannot take the story
and characters to their logical conclusion and somewhere ends up `tale`-diving
at crucial junctures in the plot.
To begin with, we are introduced to Yuvaan and his college friends in Delhi
whose only passtime is chasing dreams. The ogling, gawking, giggling, nudging,
and winking references to campus courtship, though neatly filmed by cameraman
Saurav Vishwakarma, occupies too much space in the first hour of the story when
we are told, with far less subtlety than needed, that Yuvaan is an incorrigible
flirt.
Yuvaan says he believes in "sex at first sight" and he isn`t joking.
Later, when he gets into a sexual situation with a girl, he jumps off his
bedroom windowsill.
Enter the NRI beauty, all sweetness and kindness played by newcomer Chetna Pande.
Now here`s where the plot needed to get piping hot. We wait to see Yuvaan soften
the innocent campus queen, a sort of Delhi University version of Rani Mukerji in
"Kuch Kuch Hota Hai", and push her to do things she and he would
regret later.
Instead the film goes into long-winded explanations on how Yuvaan doesn`t really
mean any harm even when he ends up making sexual advances towards the trusting
girl. Where the script should have shown Yuvaan as a young sexually over-active
lout who takes advantage of the guileless girl, it instead shows Yuvaan too as a
victim and places all the blame for the MMS scandal on the over-zealous
electronic media for over-sensationalizing the recorded clipping that "accidently"
gets on Yuvaan`s phone and "accidently" leaks out.
Though the efforts to portray the perpetrator as a victim are way too feeble and
unconvincing, the film does make some hard-hitting comments on the excessive
scandal-mongering of television channels.
The predicament of a hapless unsuspecting girl whose intimate clipping with her
boyfriend gets leaked out, was far more poignantly put forward in Anurag
Kashyap`s "Dev D".
"I Don`t Luv U" tries to balance out too many moral issues and ends up
neither here nor there. Nonetheless, tackling a theme as provocative as a sex
scandal is not easy. The film tries to weave a tender gentle love story around
an MMS scandal. Thought provoking but not salacious, the film derives a modicum
of credibility quotient from Ruslaan and Chetna`s sincere performances.
Ruslaan does the emotional scenes far more fluently than the campus flirt act.
That`s the problem here. The film takes up a sexual theme, but its heart is just
not in it.
Yuvaan , a young boy and Aayra , a non-resident Indian girl are two average teenagers who want to experience a loving relationship. Without realizing it, they end up in a devastating situation which shatters their lives.
