{"id":4629,"date":"2013-09-09T23:25:05","date_gmt":"2013-09-10T03:25:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/film\/?p=4629"},"modified":"2023-01-24T01:15:08","modified_gmt":"2023-01-24T06:15:08","slug":"movie-review-shuddh-desi-romance-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/film\/2013\/09\/movie-review-shuddh-desi-romance-2013.html","title":{"rendered":"Movie Review : Shuddh Desi Romance (2013)"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Rating : 3.5\/5
\nGenre : Romance
\nYear : 2013
\nRunning time : 2 hours 6 minutes
\nDirector : Maneesh Sharma
\nCast : Parineeti Chopra, Sushant Singh Rajput, Vaani Kapoor, Rishi Kapoor, Rajesh Sharma
\nKid rating : PG-15<\/strong><\/p>\n

The trailer<\/a>\u00a0promised a new age romance in an old historical town. “Shuddh Desi Romance” does live up to this promise, although in a less sparkly fashion than I had imagined.<\/p>\n

Raghuram Sitaram (Rajput) is a tour guide who also works as a baraati<\/em>-on-hire at Goyal\u2019s wedding caterers. At his own wedding, Raghu develops cold feet and discusses his quandary with baraati-on-hire Gayatri (Parineeti). All that ends with Raghu running away from the wedding mandap<\/em> leaving his to-be bride Tara (Vaani Kapoor) in the lurch. Sometime later when Raghu and Gayatri meet, they find that the fleeting attraction they experienced at Raghu\u2019s wedding has burgeoned into a \u201czoron<\/em> ka attraction\u201d. They start a live-in relationship with no expectations of marriage. At a rocky point in this relationship Raghu meets Tara again. She is confident, saucy and lovelier than before . . .<\/p>\n

This film questions the social practice of marriage \u2013 the why and the what. As Raghu tells us in his narrative, everyone wants you to \u201dsettle down\u201d \u2013 all else will come later. Raghu himself is not sure he wants to get married. Independent girls like Gayatri don\u2019t fit neatly into this equation either, so when Raghu moves into her barsaati<\/em>, he tells all the nosy neighbors that he is her \u201cbrother\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cShuddh Desi Romance\u201d nicely captures the atmosphere of a culturally rich, historic town with authentic sounding characters and dialog. Raghu is a lost young man and can\u2019t tame his wandering heart \u2013 something we culturally allow (and romanticize), whereas the girls must remain \u201cuntainted\u201d and when they refuse to toe the line, like Gayatri does, they get a \u201creputation\u201d.<\/p>\n

While Raghu almost perpetually has the look of a deer-in-the-headlights both Gayatri and Tara appear confident in their needs and wants. I had a hard time believing that someone as beautiful and confident as Tara would readily agree to be wedded to a \u201ctour guide\u201d in classist India. The Raghu-Gayatri romance was more believable although I wasn\u2019t over-joyed at the pairing. Love being blind would have to explain that attraction, or why would smart girls like Gayatri settle for intellectually inferior and immature boy-men like Raghu?<\/p>\n

The cast does well; I was more impressed by the two girls Parineeti and Vaani that by Rajput. Parineeti is a wonderful actress, and Vaani makes a supremely confident debut as Tara. I felt for both Gayatri and Tara, struggling against their society-assigned \u201cgood girl\u201d roles. Rajput is not a looker, but did well-enough in Kai Po Che<\/a>. Here, he is stuck with the bemused I\u2019m-out-of-my-depth look, which looks cute only the first couple of seconds. Rishi Kapoor is a little hammy as portly caterer and father-figure of sorts Goyal, and I though he was miscast. Rajesh Sharma<\/a>\u00a0has a small role as Tara\u2019s mamaji<\/em>, and excels in his short screen time.<\/p>\n

The film has a novel plot, but is a little slow and uni-dimensional. There\u2019s only so much I can take of lovey-dovey scenes \u2013 there\u2019s more to a relationship than nuzzling in bed, and the script doesn\u2019t take the opportunity to develop the characters beyond the bounds of the love-story as fully as it could have. I was a bit bored of the slow pace; the film has a running time of 2 hours, but they could have shorn off a good half-hour. What I did like in the film was the way the characters “talked” to the audience in little asides, relating to us their point of view – very nicely done. The music is very good \u2013 the title song, \u201cGulabi\u201d and \u201cTere Mere Beech Mein\u201d are some of the loveliest songs I\u2019ve heard this year.<\/p>\n

This is a good film, but I had expected so much more from director Maneesh Sharma and talented script-writer Jaideep Sahni; Sahni has written wonderful films like Rocket Singh<\/a>\u00a0and “Khosla ka Ghosla”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Kidwise : Lots of kisses\/love making\/adult situations. Film might be allright for older kids (15+).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rating : 3.5\/5 Genre : Romance Year : 2013 Running time : 2 hours 6 minutes Director : Maneesh Sharma Cast : Parineeti Chopra, Sushant Singh Rajput, Vaani Kapoor, Rishi Kapoor, Rajesh Sharma Kid rating : PG-15 The trailer\u00a0promised a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"twitter_17000648_17000648":"","facebook_10233691416821117_190635594420624":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[163,76,99,29,160],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-163","category-bollywood","category-rating-pg15","category-romance","category-social-issues"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":false,"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false,"post-thumbnail":false,"sow-carousel-default":false},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"amodini","author_link":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/film\/author\/admin"},"uagb_comment_info":4,"uagb_excerpt":"Rating : 3.5\/5 Genre : Romance Year : 2013 Running time : 2 hours 6 minutes Director : Maneesh Sharma Cast : Parineeti Chopra, Sushant Singh Rajput, Vaani Kapoor, Rishi Kapoor, Rajesh Sharma Kid rating : PG-15 The trailer\u00a0promised a … Continue reading →","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p45CAb-1cF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/film\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/film\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/film\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/film\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/film\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4629"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/film\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10334,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/film\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4629\/revisions\/10334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/film\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/film\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/film\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}