Movie Review: Jalebi

Producer- Mukesh Bhatt

Director- Pushpdeep Bharadwaj

Star Cast- Varun Mitra, Rhea Chakraborty, Mahesh Thakur and Digangana Suryavanshi

Genre- Drama

Rating- **

Convoluted Tale that Sucks!

Jyothi Venkatesh

Mumbai girl Ayesha (Rhea Chakraborty), an aspiring writer, gets enamored with her tour guide Dev (Varun Mitra), a PhD scholar in history, on a Delhi trip. Love prevails over good sense and they get married only to realize that they don’t want similar things from life. They get separated to meet again many years later on a Delhi-bound train, on which their co-passengers, like us viewers, are also as clueless as the makers of the insipid film.

The director sets out to drive home the message that unrequited love is the strongest kind of love to the viewers through this love story. A remake of a hit Bengali film, which is the remake of the Bengali film Praktan tells the story of Aisha (Rhea Chakraborty) and Dev (Varun Mitra). The film is told mostly in flashbacks over a train journey from Mumbai to Delhi where the two protagonists meet and reflect over what exactly went wrong as far as their lives were concerned.

Aisha is one complex character with a dog-in-the-manger attitude, who meets her estranged man on the train journey, but is distraught having lost him to another woman. However, you do not feel too sorry for her because you fail to understand why she messed up her marriage in the first place! Kausar Munir’s screenplay lacks teeth with its convoluted sequences.

While Varun Mitra oozes life into his role, Rhea overacts and strays away from her complex character. Digangana hardly emotes. Jeet Ganguly and Tanish Bagchi churn out repetitive music which makes one feel that one has heard it in every other Mahesh Bhatt film.

To sum up, it is not at all a quintessential love story but a convoluted tale that not only sucks but also chugs along at an excruciatingly slow place with no destination in sight