An attempted makeover of a tested storyline is never more than a handful of missteps away from turning into an outright mauling.
The latter is exactly what Dhadak metes out to Nagraj Manjule’s 2016 Marathi sleeper hit Sairat. A muddled screenplay, bland storytelling and uneven lead performances leave this glossy Karan Johar production without a proper, palpable heartbeat. With Bittergaon’s Parshya and Archi, beleaguered lovers in whom we were deeply invested, giving way to a pair of prettified, pale shadows, it is only sporadically that Dhadak shows any signs of life.
Great love stories, and god knows we need them more than ever, especially ones which dare to put the spotlight on age-old inequalities and deep-seated prejudices of caste and class and religion, shift something. The best ones go after barriers, subvert hidebound notions of honour, give us a new way of coming at that oldest story in the world: love, or something like it.
More than anything else, they give us passion, incendiary passion, that burns the screen. There is so little going on between Madhukar (Khatter) and Parthavi (Kapoor) — yes, there’s some amount of flirty ‘nonk-jhonk’; but not enough of the giddiness and the swirliness of true young love: neither Khattar, whom we’ve seen before, and Janhvi Kapoor, the late Sridevi’s daughter whose debut this is – come across as if they will live and die for their love.
Director Shashank Khaitan, who is also the writer of Dhadak, has emphasised on several occasions that the film is not a copy of Sairat. In his reimagination of Sairat, the filmmaker seems to have missed the point entirely. Dhadak is pretty and glamorous but lacks the soul of Sairat.
Janhvi Kapoor tries hard to impress in her debut film, but the shoes are too large to fill. While she gets the spunk on point, she switches her accent on and off in the more dramatic portions. Ishaan sinks his teeth into the character of the wide-eyed Madhukar, and manages to distract the viewers from the film’s many flaws. Their romance, however, is half-baked.
The film saunters rather than sprints. In Sairat, that strategy clicked famously because that film had its heart in the right place. Dhadak doesn’t. The result is a grind that pretty frames and fresh faces cannot mitigate.
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