 "Netflix & Karan Johar's Nadaaniyan Movie Review: Ibrahim Ali Khan tries hard to salvage a boring, bland, frivolous love story; Khushi Kapoor fails to impress")
Language: Hindi
Director: Shauna Gautam
Cast: Ibrahim Ali Khan, Khushi Kapoor, Mahima Chaudhry, Dia Mirza and Suniel Shetty
Pretty, rich kids wearing expensive clothes and going to elite schools and then falling in love makes for an oh-so boring story. There is nothing that is relatable about Netflix’s Nadaaniyan. It is indeed an utterly immature dramedy. The film revolves around kiddish young adults, but the problem arises because the story itself is kiddish. In fact, it’s an embarrassingly foolish film with no depth.
Today’s high school kids honestly are not so frivolous. They live in the real world and understand the hardships and they have a fire in their belly to be self-sufficient. They are not dying to go to London to study law. They are well aware of the situation in the UK and the recession scene. Nadaaniyan is a poor cousin of Karan Johar’s super-frothy Student Of The Year film. But just like Student Of The Year it objectifies school students. Let me tell you, young adults today are much sharper and smarter than prom nights, short skirts and oversized sweatshirts. They really don’t have the time for all this mindless stuff.
Netflix’s Nadaaniyan follows Pia (Khushi Kapoor), a South Delhi girl determined to script her perfect love story, and Arjun ( Ibrahim Ali Khan), a middle-class overachiever from Noida with his sights set on becoming the debate team captain. Their worlds collide when Pia ropes Arjun into a transactional arrangement — posing as her boyfriend to pull off the perfect romantic facade. The plan is simple: keep everyone guessing, no strings attached. But then real feeling sneaks in unknowingly and they fall in love with each other.
The story sounds as foolish as the name. Pia Jaisingh (Kapoor) and Arjun Mehta (Khan) live in a bubble which doesn’t really exist in reality. Dia Mirza who plays mother to Arjun ( Ibrahim Ali Khan) is sinfully under-utilised.
In some places I even felt the storyteller was trying hard to normalise infidelity too in the character played by Suniel Shetty, father of Pia (Khushi Kapoor). And the concept of Pia’s mother (Mahima Chaudhry) dying to have a son is very redundant, regressive and doesn’t really exist in today’s world. Honestly speaking, the entire narrative of a rich girl falling in love with a middle-class boy is grave and ridiculously boring. The film is so damn predictable that you don’t even need to watch the entire film to know how it ends and what is happening next.
To launch Ibrahim Ali Khan, Saif Ali Khan’s son with this kind of a film under Shauna Gautam’s directorial debut who himself is clueless about what works on the digital platform was a major risk. Though Ibrahim tries hard to at least salvage the film, he too fails. I believe he would have done a great job had he been under the tutelage of a good director. He has the potential, the good looks of his father and physique to die for, all he needs is guidance from a good craftsman. In the digital platform, you really don’t bother about locations; all you need is a solid story and this film doesn’t really have one.
We live in a world now where the audiences have evolved with the kind of exposure they have to cinema and when story is considered to be the hero, Nadaaniyan is nothing but embarrassingly shameful for cinema. In Nadaaniyan story is the biggest failure. I hate to run down the effort of any craftsmen, but here I don’t see any effort has been put. It doesn’t even look like a movie made in today’s time. This is not a love story that anybody should have that is so bland, boring and passionless. Where is the intensity kids? Where is the depth; if I may ask? And where is the time for 12th standard kids to make those perfectly sculpted bodies?
After a very long time I have seen such a lazily done film on the digital platform. And it also makes me wonder as to how Netflix even agreed to take it on their platform. When you have a series of engaging and immersive films and shows on this platform, how did they even okay this?
Being a huge lover of cinema and majorly cinema on streaming platform, Netflix’s Nadaaniyan according to me was disastrous and an embarrassing watch for today’s evolved audience. I am still at my wits end to understand what made Shauna Gautam to come up with this film. Just like the name of the film, the story is foolish, ignorant and dumb which we hardly get to see in kids these days especially in today’s hugely competitive world.
Someone once rightly said even when you are a star kid it doesn’t really help if you don’t have the talent, that actually applies for Khushi Kapoor. With her expressionless face and frozen smile, she fails yet again. Learning how to act is hard work; it’s a craft and one needs to give their blood and sweat to make it big, it cannot be as easy as a little nip here and a little tuck there. As for Ibrahim, I still feel he has the potential to do well under a good director. First love is like a flame that never extinguishes, but Nadaaniyan is easily forgettable!
Rating: 1 and half out of 5
WATCH the trailer of Nadaaniyan here:
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