He is handsome. She is a wacko. He loves his fiancée. She is the fiancée’s sister. He cares about her. She doesn’t care about anything at all! That’s Hasee Toh Phasee for you, a rom-com in which Parineeti Chopra’s Meeta speaks in fluent Mandarin, eats toothpaste, and steals stuff, all the while staying in the house of Nikhil (Sidharth Malhotra), her sister’s husband-to-be, as her track record at her own house isn’t good enough for a stay there!

Story, what story?

Hasee Toh Phasee takes place in the ideal world of Karan Johar, where there are no crooks in the world, where you can roam the city without getting mugged and where there is just one bad person in the family, the others are as forgiving as the Star Plus characters. And in that universe exists Nikhil, a struggling businessman who is about to marry Karishma (Adah Sharma) but gets distracted by her sister Meeta, who wants to meet Papa for her own reasons. Simple, isn’t it? Not when you are a thief (she steals stuff that we find here and there), a drug addict (she pops pills just like we pop smarties!), and is so confident that people around her start feeling inferior! All of this happens just one week prior to the great Indian wedding, for which relatives (of all kinds) visit from around the world and the stage is set – for a comedy of errors!

A fresh lead pair is never boring!

The film begins on a high note with scenes of the younger version of the hero and heroine doing something annoying and getting away with it due to their ingenuity. From here on, the audience believes that they are made for each other but instead of the plot getting thick, it gets thin and awry. When the duo does meet in the present, they don’t click at first, and when they do, it’s too late!

However, one must commend the lead pair – Sidharth (Student of The Year) and Parineeti (Ishaqzaade) – for being fresh and intelligently quirky. In their solo scenes as well as their sequences together, they gel well and by the time the movie ends, you want them to be together. The one time where Nikhil takes Meeta to ‘meet’ Papa is funny since it gave them both a chance to show their talent as actors.

What the director should have missed!

The inspiration behind the quirky tale of misfits seems to have come up from Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met, Ali Abbas Zafar’s Mere Brother Ki Dulhan and many other rom-coms from the other side of Wagah. Here we have a groom who is indecisive, because on one hand, there is his sweetheart of seven years and on the other is her sister whom he met seven days before tying the knot!

The cousin who is an ‘Anu Malik’ fan makes you smile at first but when he overdoes the act, looks silly. Others have nothing much to do except the uncle who, for no reason keeps slapping his niece and all the father (Manoj Joshi) could do is nothing. Strange … I wouldn’t come back for the same father even if my life depended on it! As for the uncle, I would have done something about him, considering I was a chemical engineer, rather than chicken out and run away.

Vishal-Shekhar needs to rediscover their magic!

Just like it happened to their fellow RD Burman followers Jatin-Lalit, Vishal-Shekhar seem to have become monotonous. ‘Punjabi Wedding Song’ is the foot-tapping shaadi number necessary for a film revolving around a wedding, and ‘Drama Queen’ is the usual chher chhaar song featuring young people in love. It was ‘Zah-e-Naseeb’ that disappoints, not because it sounds nice but resembles ‘Bin Tere’ from I Hate Luv Stories. ‘Shake It Like Shammi’ is fast and loveable but could have been much better had the lyrics been more clear! It was during the song I was reminded by a friend that it was supposed to be a tribute to Shammi Kapoor. The best song is however, Shafqat Amanat Ali’s ‘Manchala’ where he shows his class and makes the point that, no matter how many clones you develop, the master always remains the master!

Hasee Toh Phasee could have been so much better!

"I promise I won’t run away. Life-time guarantee," Parineeti’s character tells the hero while they are travelling in a bus at night but what the audience needed was a guarantee that they would get something new rather than the tried-and-tested story in a new bottle. There was no need for the lead pair to travel in a bus, that too at night, and the same could be said regarding many sequences in the flick which seemed to be forced in the script to make people laugh!

The film could have been a little better had the editor done his job rather than smiling at the scenes as this is exactly what he seems to have done. There were many scenes in which the crowd laughed and even I clapped once because the director Vinil Mathew’s attention to detail was amazing. Had he been a little more attentive towards the script and the editing, Hasee Toh Phasee would have gone on to become a classic. Right now it is just one of the many rom-coms that seem to come, make you laugh and disappear!

The writer works for Geo TV and can be contacted at omair78@gmail.com