IBTimes India Rating: 1.5
"Sanam Re" does a lot of things to you. It gives you the kind of pain you would experience if your brains were to be pulsed in a grinder, it ruins your ability to make sound decisions, and it robs you of your precious, hard-earned money.
Akash (Pulkit Samrat) and Shruti (Yami Gautam) are childhood sweethearts from the quaint town of Tanakpur. They write their names on school benches with a cupid's heart in between, wear half-sleeved sweaters to school in snow blizzards, and make promises they can never hope to fulfil.
Just when the film was neck-deep in Bollywood's clichés, director Divya Khosla Kumar decided to add a third dimension to this already soppy love story. Enter miss long legs aka Ex Mrs. Pablo (Urvashi Rautela) who is drawn towards Mr. a lot of muscles/ Akash but fails to charm him as he takes fancy to the chirpy and excruciatingly bubbly Shruti.
At this point they are all attending a yoga camp in Alberta, Canada. You would ask why? How else would one put all the hard work at the gym to good use? Inhaling fresh air while flaunting supremely sculpted bodies by the beach makes for splendid sight but sadly isn't pivotal to the script.
Cut to, songs and montages of two grown-up adults (at least that was what they looked like) running across the Canadian meadows, flying kites, spending nights in jail, stealing vehicles and all the while calling it the little pleasures of life. I am not sure if I know anyone who would call a night-out behind the bars pleasurable. But then again, it's Bollywood, where two flowers brushing against each other once meant consummation.
The narrative slowly heads towards the grim bit where the lovers separate. But what happens after they take different ways is unexpected and is definitely not what was being speculated all this while. In a time and age where getting in touch with people is just a button away, Shruti decides to stay mum for months until the day she realises what she had lost.
Samrat is a good-looking man and has delivered a strong yet subtle performance, unfortunately the story isn't strong enough to support his acting chops. Gautam emotes well in a few scenes but in most appears severely hung-over from the fairness cream advertisement she features in often. Rautela takes on morose expressions for every shot so much so that I couldn't tell if she was upset from losing her onscreen love or the crown.
Direction and editing could have been tighter and a few unnecessary scenes trashed. However, Rishi Kapoor as Akash's Dadu and his equation with his grandkid is something that will warm the cockles of your heart and stay with you long after you have left the theatres. The soulful numbers and locales are another plus but that's only what's there to it.
In a nutshell, this film should have never been made. The old-school romance and the whole idea of unadulterated love don't sit well in the Tinder era.
