Half Girlfriend, adapted from a novel by Chetan Bhagat, is like a factory-made Swiss roll: a sickly-sweet smelling, squishy, artificially-flavoured byproduct that passes off as the real thing. You know something is off from one look at the packaging — and it tastes worse. But such monstrosity sells by the truckloads after mind-numbing advertising and targeting the right demographic do the trick.

Like an error in judgement made with utmost insincerity and a foresight for profits, the Swiss roll analogy sticks equally to Chetan Bhagat’s novel — some of the most amateur material that I’ve skimmed through — and its motion picture counterpart directed by Mohit Suri.

In the movie (and the novel) a loser youngster from rural Bihar (Madhav, played by an ever-ballooning Arjun Kapoor) aces a college scholarship and mostly succeeds in wooing a mopey rich girl (Riya played by Shraddha Kapoor) who dreams of singing in a New York restaurant one day.

Madhav, who understands but cannot speak fluent English, is a buffoon whose kind nature turns into carnal frustration when Riya wouldn’t ‘do it’ with him. She only sees him as a friend (and a worse-case scenario love-interest), agreeing to be his ‘half girlfriend.’ Like the logic-defying irrelevance of the film’s title, this confuses the hell out of the country bumpkin. (To put a spin on Al Pachino’s dialogue from The Devil’s Advocate: “Look (and peck) but do not touch.”)

She dumps him for a rich snob, leaves for the US only to return to his life as a divorcee because even losers deserve a second chance. (Spoiler alert: she promptly fakes a fatal disease and runs away again). He returns home to mum who runs a small school and stumbles on a United Nation’s grant for rural schools in Bihar funded by Bill Gates. And yes, Bill does make an entrance late in the movie — as a CGI-ed head on top of a tall, lanky body.

A weekend watch comprising Half Girlfriend and Saba Qamar’s Bollywood debut, Hindi Medium

Custom-made for today’s youth where class is a less-dramatic inconvenience for ‘true love’, the plot falls flat on its face as if it slipped on a banana peel. One wishes this were a comedy, only the filmmakers are dead-serious about Madhav and Riya’s fusses.

Both Suri and Bhagat (producing his first film here) know they can get away with a bland, half-grounded sob-fest. Package it beautifully enough, pair a good-looking couple in various states of melancholic distress, sprinkle a few insufferable songs as if feeding chickens and you’ve got yourself a hit for people who like the counterfeit Swiss roll. (Half Girlfriend made 30 crore Indian rupees on the opening weekend with a production budget of 35 crore Indian rupees.)

Medium Matters

Now, if you are sick of Bollywood clichés and crave a little more sensible sustenance from films, there’s Hindi Medium which stars Saba Qamar as a mum frantic about her daughter’s future. For the Pakistani audience, Qamar is reason enough to watch the film. For anyone whose reasons are less skin-deep (and have skipped her previous two Pakistani movies), Hindi Medium serves unexpected depth that is universal and unique.

Sanket Chaudhry (director, co-writer) doesn’t pound preachiness in your face. He starts Hindi Medium 15 years back at a tailoring shop. Raj (Delzad Hiwale) is an apprentice who has his heart punctured by Cupid’s arrow the moment Meet (Sanjana Sanghi) walks into the shop. A bit class-conscious, she wants a bare-back kurta. The tailor (the conservative father-figure kind) thinks the look is a tad too bold for her. Her mum settles for a compromise (“net laga dena” she says). Raj courts Meet with the soft-voiced assurance that there will be no net on her kurta. In that brief instance starts an old-school romance — one that firmly develops the outlook of these two characters.

Raj grows up to become Irrfan Khan and Meet becomes Saba Qamar (with an apparent Pakistani accent). He has a thriving three-floor boutique in Chandni Chowk that sells first copies of designer Manish Malhotra’s outfits. She is still conscious of her lifestyle. To get their daughter a better education, they move to an upper class neighborhood. Both life and school enrollment is needlessly complicated and insanely corrupt, and Hindi Medium’s screenplay is keenly sympathetic of this fact.

Raj and Meet (ranging from okay to fine) have filler characteristics that bide the time until the big climax (he can’t speak English, she believes that their child will end up a druggie if she is not sent to a prestigious school). By then they learn a lot about people, life, upper class snobbery and how education matters to everyone and not just the rich.

You can’t make this stuff up. But then again, since this is a movie, some of the stuff you can.

Published in Dawn, ICON, May 28th, 2017