Awful acting, average sub-plots and a low-key entertainer!
Cast: Bidita Bag, Prateek Chakraborty, Evelyn Sharma, Sharad Malhotra
Director: Prateek Chakraborty
Rating: 1.5 / 5
The golden jubilee comeback of Banner, Pramod Films, ‘From Sydney With Love’ manages to keep you entertained for all the wrong reasons. Superman t-shirts and boxers, coupled with the picturesque locales of Australia are probably the best tit-bits of this film.
Well, everything else is just something you have to sit through!
‘From Sydney With Love’ is the story of Raj Bakshi (Prateek Chakraborty) – “naam toh suna hoga, aur dialogue bhi” who falls in love with ‘new chic in town’ Megha Banerjee (Bidita Bag) who is fresh out of Bolpur, a village in West Bengal, India. Megha on the other hand falls head over heels with Rohit Khurrana(Sharad Malhotra) who is an avid photographer, a Delhi-boy based in Sydney, with no expectations from his lady-love.
The story follows the trio falling in and out of love, in Sydney and India and how three innocent hearts find their respective partners. How the lives of college students in University of New South Wales changes with the entry of a traditional Indian girl, is what the film is all about.
That’s about it!
With bad dialogues – “friend nahin toh facebook friend hi sahi”, epitomes of unbearable acting by Bidita Bag, who has a staunch local accent, and no interesting sub-plots in the first half, the movie greatly disappoints.
The music of the film, by music composer Sohail Sen, is a low key, with 7 out of place songs and misfit lyrics.
The songs are ‘child-like’ edited versions of a memory book placed into a film montage! The background score has been created to entertain and tickle your ribs, but the ‘Cartoon Network’-like sounds that interrupt the scenes, fail to make you laugh.
Antara Lahiri does a bad job of editing throughout the film – with dramatic horror and action-like effects at times, and ‘POGO’-like effects on others. The cinematography by Piyush Shah, on the other had is lovely, with lots of great shots of our leads at work.
Prateek Chakraborty does a far better role at acting than being the director. His farts, flaunting of butt-cracks and naturally being an unlikeable character on screen, make him wonderful to watch as a comic character. However, as a director and a story teller, Chakraborty fails to tell a story.
The film overall is an average, typical Bollywood movie. However, there is one extremely well shot sequence in the film, where you find yourself laughing uncontrollably – The ‘rugby’ match between the ‘fat and unhealthy versus the athletic and muscular’.
The film follows an uncanny timeline, too. In the first half, it skips two months, and later 3 years, and the audience finds themselves watching fat boy falling in love with weird girl in an empty amusement park.
And you are praying, “Ah! Not another song!”
Supporting characters, Evelyn Sharma and Karan Sagoo are beautiful to look at on screen, but are cleary terrible actors. They are like the impeccable perfect beauties who model for a living and give the movie a pleasant visual appeal, but the moment a dialogue erupts out of their mouth, the dreary image of faultlessness is replaced by “OMG, not again!”
Post interval, once the movie returns to India, it suddenly develops a fast-paced plot. The second half of the film, sees a drastic change in the relationship of the trio with an increase in emotional Bengali drama – with a teary mother, a vengeful father, a suicidal sister and ‘Bhotku’ the fattest kid alive, delivering over-the-top, unnecessary humor to the film.
‘From Sydney With Love’ takes you through ‘falling in love’ at first, but later, introduces you to money lenders, a ‘balle balle’ wedding and one crises solved after another, by the virtuous, everlasting hero – fat boy Raj.
When the credits roll, you find yourself glued to your seat, thinking that there was something to look forward to in this film. A fun, quirky, college-like, love-shuv film, with a wonderfully young and enthusiastic feel to it!
But when it’s all finally over you cannot help asking yourself, “What just happened”?!
