DIL JUUNGLEE

In Dil Juunglee, before anyone with a sane mind can muster “Where are these characters going?” debuting director Aleya Sen pushes them out on a road trip. This very literal answer to a metaphorical question doesn’t simplify things.

The trip is superficial and awkward, just like the movie, but it does springboard the story before one asks deeper questions; those questions, though, we must ask.

Koroli — Koro for short (Taapsee Pannu) — is a dorky girl in love with the swooning idea of love found in romance novels. She is a billionaire heiress who left her business management studies in the UK and teaches English literature in Delhi. Being a dork (complete with glasses and a klutzy attitude), she is, of course, unlucky in love — having recently been dumped by a pudgy middle-class crybaby.

Down and tipsy one night, her juunglee (wild) nature jiggles out in a pub where one of her students realise that there’s a hot party animal within her reserved nature. The student, Sumit (Saqib Saleem), though, isn’t really falling head-over-heels for her. Actually, despite what the clichéd climax has us believe, he never does. She doesn’t love him either from what I’ve seen (or it might just be Taapsee’s inarticulate acting and ineffective writing).

Koro and Sumit fall in love, decide to elope, fall apart and reunite in London seven years later. She is now mature (meaning: she has fashionably short hair, no glasses and dresses in a business suit), handles her father’s business and is engaged to her childhood friend. Sumit too has succeed somewhat; he is a low-budget actor, and in a relationship. The two crash into each other again.

Dil Juunglee is preposterous, pondering and pitiable at the same time. Its lack of groundedness, blitzing pace and a haphazard narrative layout alienates people (even though the editor does a good job of trying to keep the film sane). The scenes are choppy, uneven and uninteresting; the acting (with the exception of an actor or two) just as bad.

The screenplay (Tonoya Sen Sharma, Shiv Singh) wants to talk about screwed up people yet it only ends up with bad (and clichéd) characters. The juunglee dil the plot proposes comes out domesticated — and you don’t feel bad for them at all (if one felt anything for them in the first place).

3 STOREYS

Speaking of characters, there’s a lot of them with a lot of depth in 3 Storeys. Like the title’s intelligence, the story — an anthology and not a thriller as the film is sold — covers three floors of a chawl, and four sets of characters. Each storey’s story is engagingly told as a one-off short-story, yet shrewdly interlinked to the overall concept.

The first tale is about an old woman (a stupendous Renuka Shahane) who demands an astronomical amount for her small apartment (0.8 million Indian rupees instead of 0.2 million Indian rupees). A young businessman (Pulkit Samrat) without family, looking to settle in the overcrowded city, visits the place with the broker and after careful deliberation buys it.

The second tale is of a physically, sexually and emotionally abused woman (Masumeh Makhija) who functions in her role as a wife, mother and a good-hearted member of society. Yet she feels dead inside. She is friends with the old woman from the first story, and a sweet-tempered, pregnant newcomer to the chawl who is married to a guy working in Dubai. In her heart she longs for a man she fell in love with a few years back (Sharman Joshi), who couldn’t marry her because of his lower caste status.

The caste issue surfaces yet again in the third tale: a young Muslim boy (Ankit Rathi) in love with a young Hindu girl (Aisha Ahmed). Everyone in the chawl knows this. Their parents, like all parents, can’t help but feel nauseated by the fact — and for once, as the story goes, they have a good enough reason.

The final tale is of the narrator, Leela (Riccha Chaddha) — the promiscuous woman who lives at the ground floor and whose voiceover bounds these tales together.

3 Storeys is deliberately written as one-off short stories with Maupassant-like high-realism and O. Henry-like twists. Arjun Mukerjee weaves a compact, firm, seamless flow that compliments each tale, yet upkeeps the universe he and his writer (Althea Delmas Kaushal) built. This is by far the best bang for the buck one can get from cinemas this week.

Published in Dawn, ICON, March 18th, 2018