Dil, Dosti, Etc - Review

It’s been more than a month since this film released and the review comes in quite late in the day. But can’t help it, I have not been watching movies for a long, long time. Dil, Dosti, Etc might not go on to become a cult film but I would still call it a decent attempt. Coming from the stable of Prakash Jha (he has produced it), Dil, Dosti has a high reality quotient associated with the film. The scenes in the film are straight away pulled from life. The college environment depicted in the film is not the Lovedale College set up shown in candy floss movies and neither do the characters break into a jig every now and then to woo their lady love.

When you are young, you feel that the possibilities are endless – This film revolves around two people, their aspirations and how they go about achieving it with the backdrop of university politics at DU. As for how it fared, I felt that the movie gained pace from the very outset, reached a crescendo and then plummeted. I might be wrong in judging it this way but I feel that the script was flawed.

I went in to watch the film with a hangover of Haasil which marked the arrival of Irfan Khan and I couldn’t keep myself from comparing the two films. Both had the backdrop of University politics but Haasil was more filmi and commercial in its approach while Dil, Dosti has a more arthouse flavour. The film has its share of a few ‘bold’ scenes too.

High points:

Performances: Shreyas Talpade gives a clean performance, getting his Bihari accent correct and suiting the part he played. I felt that he was underplayed in the film and seemed more like the support hero. Imad Shah is a revelation. He does not have that chiseled look or anything that can be called heroic about him but the director has tried his best to give us a new Emraan Hashmi avatar. He gets to lip lock with all the girls who are given some screen space in the film – lucky b******!

Characterizations: Manish Tiwary, the director of the film hails from Bihar and it seems that he has also been a part of the DU milieu. Both these aspects were evident in way he has created the characters, not just the protagonists but also the supporting ones. The ragging scenes reminded me of the superman days some of us had to brave during our own ragging days at college. I almost felt a part of the whole set-up.

Dialogues: The film has good and measured dialogues. Nothing over the top. Smart lines and the point is put across.

Lows:

Script: Imad’s character lets go off an offer from Yale to live and experience life that thrives in the nooks and corners of India. He goes a step further to leave the cool, cosy comforts of a Mercedes Benz to drive around on a Yezdi (which people rode eons ago). I don’t know what prompted him to take on the bet of bedding three girls in eight days. Although the film started with him trying to search for love and Shreyas trying to find his bearing in the political arena, the one sided bet seemed to have become the whole premise of the story by the time it ended.

Having said that, I must also point out that you cannot keep yourself from praising the way the writer has actually brought out all that goes through the minds of a young college going kid. Imaad’s portrayal of a confused and searching young ‘pseudo-intellectual’ as he is referred to in the film as well as the depiction of the cosmopolitan and middle class values through different characters is praiseworthy.

Music: There was not much scope for music in the film. They still managed to have that item number forced into the plot. Some might say that the song actually took the story forward but I will never be convinced. To add to it, the song and its picturisation were awful.

Dil, Dosti is a film that DU people should not miss out on. As for others, I would call it a casual film. Casual because you don’t plan to go and watch such films, you watch it when you either have nothing to do or you have no better thing to do.

I am now looking forward to watching No Smoking, not because of the lineage it boasts of (directed by Anurag Kashyap of Black Friday fame) but because I have been challenged to weather this high voltage, abstract, infathomable..hmm..lemme rather reserve the epithets till I watch the film. Is its DVD out?