2 States: Bad book, worse film

2 States is a dated yuppie romantic comedy neck-deep in cliches and platitudes

Anybody who will go to watch this film having read the book at some point will go with the general expectation that there isn’t much distance to cover between the levels of subtlety in Chetan Bhagat’s not-so-literary offering and Karan Johar’s filmy melodrama. They will unfortunately be proved wrong, as I was. Or maybe it’s a tendency to romanticise the past that we are inadvertently falling into. 2 States, the film, seemed to be much more painful to sit through, with unconvincing lacklustre performances by a not very Tamilian Alia Bhatt (as Ananya Swaminathan) and a not very Punjabi Arjun Kapoor (as Krish Malhotra), abounding in literal platitudes and unfunny humour about the North-South divide. Director Abhishek Varman has taken the more readable of Bhagat’s unreadable fare and hyped up the melodrama into an overly long and generic kind of cinema.

The plotline is simple enough. Broody, geeky boy meets ‘manic pixie dream girl’ at IIM Ahmedabad, and gets her after the worst pickup line used in history, falling in love and devoting entire songs to their very enthusiastic lovemaking. But wanting to get married proves to be their consequent undoing, because they are from... yes, you guessed it, two different States. Varman borrows a little trope from The Great Gatsby and has the boy recount the whole tale through trips to the therapist. Yet that does not add any consistency to the film, which goes straight from light-hearted romance to Public Service Social Message (Part 1, dowry; 2, inter caste marriage; and 3, family bonding) in a completely arbitrary fashion.

The film has absolutely nothing new to offer: some corny romance built on zero chemistry but lots of sexually liberated fun, half a dozen song montages that offer a faster plot pace than the jarringly slow drama, and a wholly predictable happy ending. The lyrics and wordplay range from plain bad to simply atrocious (“Iski uski kaun kiski yaaran da imaan whisky/ Uspe chicken ho to hor wadhiya” to “makkhan sirf khaaya jaata hai, lagaya nahi jaata.”) The film is obviously put together as a family entertainer (apart from all the premarital sex, we’re guessing) and to that end it tries very hard. There are plenty of Delhi-Chennai cross-cultural fires that Krish and Ananya keep dousing all over the place, but unlike that other entertaining cross-cultural caper Vicky Donor, 2 States can’t help but use every stereotype in the book, and ends up turning them into broad and cringe-worthy caricatures.

The second half documents languorously the labours of love, as they both try to woo each other’s families. A whole lot of bickering, bantering and emotional atyachar later, the film manages to parody the general cultural bloopers within the two communities (racism and dowry for Punjabis and sullen pretentiousness for the Tamilians) without eliciting more than a handful of stray sniggers from the audience.

The young actors can only do so much with this “adapted screenplay”. Kapoor is your  cheap knockoff of Abhishek Bachchan and watching him struggle to emote anything but a puppy-dog, cry-baby face will be yet another Herculean task for you. Bhatt’s halfway decent performance is peppered with the odd Southern twang and saccharine smiles from time to time.

The parents, on the other hand, fare much better; Ronit Roy does yet another angry old drunkard man with aplomb, while Revathy is all restrained grace. Apart from lovers of Karan Johar’s trademark overarching narrative, conventional visual style, high doses of insipid drama and odd moments of comedy, 2 States is a complete waste of time and patience. Can’t argue with the fact that the film has been marketed well enough to be a box-office hit anyway, but it sure isn’t worth your time.