Yahoo Movies Review: Veere Di Wedding
Cast: Kareena Kapoor Khan, Sonam K Ahuja, Swara Bhaskar, Shikha Talsania, Sumeet Vyas
Direction: Shashanka Ghosh
Rating: **
Four hip and happening girls and Bollywood’s favourite canvas – a big fat Indian wedding – you wonder what could go wrong! But so much effort goes into making them appear “cool”, that I doubt if the director was left with the time and space to put any thought into the actual plot.
When Kalindi Puri (Kareena) decides to tie the knot, her BFFs come together to attend a typical extravagant Delhi wedding. All of them are dealing with issues of their own – Avni Sharma (Sonam) is being pressurized by her mother to settle for an arranged marriage; Sakshi Soni (Swara) is in the midst of a divorce; and Meera Sood (Shikha) has had unresolved issues with her family ever since she ran away and married a firang.
You would think Kalindi has it all sorted, but though she has a perfect fiancé in Rishabh Malhotra (Sumeet), she has misgivings about marriage as an institution because she remembers the bitter fights her parents used to have.
Everything is kosher for our feisty Dilli ki kudiyan – they smoke, they drink, they talk sex and orgasms – and even vibrators and masturbation are part of dinner-table discussions. I have no issues with all of that, as long as they flow organically into the scheme of things.
Trouble is, every time they use a swear word – with shuddh desi cathartic resonance – it feels as if they are all secretly cringing inside.
The characters, their angst, their internal conflicts, the eventual fall-out and the impromptu ‘Sex and the City’ inspired getaway – are all like disjointed pieces of a puzzle that just don’t come together into a compelling story. Their individual struggles come across as half-baked attempts at making them seem real under their faux, glamorous skins.
All in all, you can forget comparing this one to bromances such as ‘Dil Chahta Hai’ or ‘Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’, or even to Sonam Kapoor’s ‘Aisha’ (which was a far superior story).
The narrative is haphazard and never tugs at the heartstrings. It gives you no pack-your-bags-for-an-all-girls trip goals. It’s almost like the director – so preoccupied with the superficiality of his characters – ran out of time to imbue them with any element of realism.
Of the girls, Kareena, Swara, and even Shikha, get their comic timing right. But Sonam just doesn’t seem comfortable playing a lawyer who is “bahar se satti” and “andar se slutty”. Sumeet Vyas wins our hearts with a sincere performance and you can’t help but empathize with him for being caught in the crossfire between his flashy family and a restrained girlfriend.
Despite some genuine humour, this girl-squad romantic comedy falls flat. The fact that two songs are reserved for the end-credits suggests that somewhere things didn’t happen as planned.
In sum, this is not entirely unwatchable. Only, in trying too hard to play it cool, the whole experience comes across as somewhat pretentious.
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