Reviewed: Hamaari Adhuri Kahani

‘Hamari Adhuri Kahani’ is one of those movies, which emphasizes on the fact that good writing is the most important part of a movie, and that bad writing cannot be covered up with other great aspects.
The movie is a multi-storied building with exclusively designed floors of acting, direction, cinematography, screenplay, photography etc. But the whole building, even with its great design, is bound to collapse due to its weak foundation of a ‘taken for granted’ treatment of writing.

Story/Script/ Screenplay: –
In my opinion, ‘Hamari Adhoori Kahani’ could have been a blockbuster without its script and story. No, seriously. The story of the movie is about a highly successful group-of-hotels owner who has a ‘ from rags to riches’ story behind his success. This guy falls in love with a girl because he relates the girl with his mother (not at all the beginning of a healthy relationship; in my opinion).
The girl who is married and has a child but is deserted by her husband, suddenly starts to reciprocate to his love and then suddenly stops, and then suddenly starts and so on. Basically, the outer wall of a bubble is thicker than the plot of the story of this film.
To compliment the storyline, the script even further drops in the quality department. Everything that happens in the script seems to be forcefully brought together. There is no realistic flow to the script. Things happen because the writers have written that they happen; is the best logic one can come up with for the script of the movie.
The elements in the story and script are so loosely tied and brought together that it seems the writers wrote these in parts at different times and different locations and then just pasted all the pieces together without giving any thought to the realism or continuity.

Surprisingly, even with the sad script and story, the screenplay is written quite well. The screenplay tries to juice-out everything possible from the story and script and that’s maybe why this movie is at least bearable.

Dialogues: –

Dialogues in this movie teach us an important lesson about over-doing stuff. To begin with, almost all dialogues are distributed in the three to four characters, two of them being madly in love. Apparently being in love means that you just cannot talk straight. When in love, you have to make each sentence poetic; so says the film. The writers have overdone the poetic effect in the dialogues. Words throughout the movie are so forcefully attempted to be made poetic that by the end, you start feeling nauseated.
Apart from the near-poem dialogues about love and feelings of love, there aren’t many words in there that make any real sense. With extremely old and ragged and exhausted clichés that appear in almost every fifth or sixth sentence, the writers have ruined the impact of the acting skills of the brilliant actors.

Direction: –

Though a few typical directorial gimmicks are used here and there, overall the direction was pretty good. I admire the skill of the director that he managed to give the movie a stable flow even when there was lack of it in the writing.
The optimum use of resources that are available, including the actors, is what defines a good director and I think the director of this movie got it correct.
He managed to give the movie a few very interesting and intriguing scenes, which were, probably, absent in the written form.

Photography and Cinematography: –

The scenic beauty, locations and sets of this film were too good. These aspects at least gave a visually pleasing effect to the movie whenever the audio effect was letting you down.
If an exhibition of all the pictures clicked during the filming of the movie is set up, the production will earn back all their losses that the movie made. That is how good the wok of the cinematographer and photographer was.

Background Music and Songs: –

Well, actually you cannot differentiate the background music from the songs in this movie. Almost every single song was background music to fill up the void created by absence of good dialogues.
In fact the whole point of background music in the movie must have been to camouflage the ill effects of the ill dialogues; why else would the background music be so loud that it interrupted dialogue delivery?

Acting: –

Due to the three brilliant actors like ‘Vidya Balan’, ‘Emraan Hashmi’ and ‘Rajkumar Rao’, the movie was saved from utter humiliation. Even in the presence of baseless storyline, crappy dialogues, ill built characters and loud background, these actors have given super-awesome performances.
Had this movie been made with more concrete base of good writing, ‘Vidya Balan and Rajkumar Rao’ would have been at least nominated for acting awards.

Conclusion: –
The movie is like that crate of fresh and juicy fruits that we have to throw away just because one fruit had fungus on it. Even when few of the aspects of the movie were brilliant, and few others were pretty good, the writing of the movie makes it a huge no-no. If you have all that time to spend, go out and do some exercise. The amount of muscular stress in that, will be similar to that of the mental stress you will feel during the movie and after the movie.

By Neeraj S. K.