Ek Haseena Thi Ek Deewana Tha Hindi Movie
You don't care if the lad in Zorro's leftover clothes shows up to rescue the drowning girl like Tarzan, swinging from a wire (yes! In the middle of nowhere!). And before you know it, he is kissing the girl in the name of CPR. The girl come to, but only laugh giddily at her best friend who was fixing a broken down car.
These are three main characters in the film. Natasha, the 'haseena', Zorro aka Dev aka the 'deewana' and Natasha's best friend Sunny (played by Upen Patel). This film will make you feel sorry for Upen Patel and that is a brand new feeling because he has not made any amazing career choices.
The haseena cannot help lusting after the deewana. And you must be forewarned that you will see an elaborate and unintentionally hilarious love-making scene on a horse.
'Come ride with me'
'But I don't know how'
'You were once the best rider on this estate.'
And that's all it takes for her impossible high heels to come off and with them, the long flowy skirt comes off too, and she's perched in front of the deewana, riding through the wilderness while he's kissing her bare back, and then in a gymnastic gesture, she turns around to face him and the poor horse continues trotting through the woods...
It's a debut film for both the haseena and the deewana, and they need to go back to a day job once the film crashed at the box office. Neither has any acting chops, not dialog delivery, and they do not heat up the screen but scald it with their presence. The haseena moans more than she delivers dialog. The deewana is made to say, 'Khushiyaan nahi dard ke kharaashein hain' (not happiness but scars of sadness), the funniest: you are present, I am past, how can we have a future?
Before you choke on that, you realise that the deewana is an 'atma' a ghost (everyone in the film pronounces the word as if the word had two letters each of 'G' and 'H' in its spelling). That's why he didn't die when he fell off the cliff rather dramatically (the audience is too busy laughing at the skinniest legs they have seen on a hero). But then, if he is an 'atma', a spirit who materialises every time the haseena calls out his name, why did they waste so much time showing him run after the bad guy through the woods? Couldn't he just materialise in front of the baddie and beat him up?
You also wonder how the 'atma' kisses the haseena every time they meet? If he's just the spirit from the past, and he is actually her grandma's lover who was killed off for being farm-hand, and he's come back to life to save her from someone who wants to kill her, why does he kiss her all the time? Lust between grandma's lover and granddaughter seems to be very weird!
Upen Patel the poor friend who was supposed to marry haseena, is friendzoned and how! You feel bad for the lad, but he sticks around wearing cable knit jumpers while haseena wanders about wearing flimsy dresses. The deewana is eminently forgettable in his gigantic pink lips (envied only by the Blue Groper fish) and stubble and skinny legs.
There are so many songs, and the songs are each at least five minutes long, you wonder if it is the same director who gave us pulp movies of Akshay Kumar and Bobby Deol. The music of Nadeem-Shravan seems ancient and out of place in the movie.
The prize for overacting in this largely hilarious romance goes to the clutching the left pec in comic alarm in the hope of conveying a heart attack by haseena's dad who looks like a poor man's Aditya Pancholi. Of course he turns out to be the bad guy who is given a priceless dialog like: For twenty one years I told you bedtime stories, now it time to hear bad time stories.
What?! Yes, daddy dearest wants the property to himself. He killed mom for it and now he wants to kill his daughter. What?! But don't worry, the atma foils that plan and in the fracas, daddy shoots haseena, Sunny falls in front of the bullet, asking God to unite haseena and deewana and in a shower of stardust god complies. You ask yourself 'why were you here, why were you here' as the the united lovers sing, 'Where were you, where were you, where were you?'
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