Cook & Ride:
The eponymous Heer (played by newbie Divita Juneja) is one of those annoying smug young women, who can cook as well as they can ride, have platitudes always ready to be trotted out and make virtue signalling a habit.
In a restaurant kitchen, she is seen cooking a Punjabi spread once, with a smile on her face, hair flying like there was a fan blowing by the stove (what happened to hair-covering restaurant hygiene?). Before that she is seen outpacing a bus on her horse to give some random kid his lunch tiffin. A horse will play a part later in the film, is obvious.
In Heer Express, directed by Umesh Shukla, who seems to have paid too little attention to the script, her uncles (Gulshan Grover-Sanjay Mishra) run Preeto Da Dhaba in memory of their sister, whose daughter Heer is. They have made her their life’s mission, not having married or started families of their own. A Hindi-speaking white woman, Olivia (Sarah Lockett) and her Indian manager (Sidekick? Secretary? Played by Meghna Malik), invites Heer to start a Preeto Da Dhaba franchise in London, where her husband has an Indian restaurant.
After much weeping and moaning, she goes to London; Olivia’s good-for-nothing son, Mickey (Ben Walton-Jones ), who was supposed to fetch her from the airport is stoned, so a helpful Indian Uber driver, Ronny (Prit Kamani) takes her, not to the house, but to the drug den where he and Heer are arrested in a police raid. This sort of thing used to happen in films ages ago, and already by this point, the film looks like it will be a long, contrived, melodrama.
When Ashuosh Rana makes an appearance as TJ, Olivia’s husband, it is already clear who he really is, and an excuse is found to delay the renaming of his restaurant, so he does not come face to face with the uncles till much later. It is not difficult to guess where the film is going.
Before the inevitable riding competition, there are weddings, accidents, paralytic strokes, sneaky villainy by Mickey, and a flat romance between Heer and Ronny. Of course, Heer is sanskaari, the white kids are rebellious, wastrels and ingrates. (Manoj Kumar’s Bharat spirit lives on.) The white actors are mostly bored-looking extras.
For someone who has been invited to turn the fortunes of a failing Indian restaurant, Heer just makes a cup of masala tea for TJ, and spends the rest of the time flapping around London, giving people lectures on family values. Because it is the trend now. Heer, Ronny and others sing an “India” song, and run around the city waving the tricolour.
Heer Express, hardly anything stands out. The comedy is unfunny, the emotional bits are dubious (why would a man take on a murder charge for a stranger?) and the music forgettable. In many lazily-written films, characters overhear long-held secrets blurted out in detail with doors open but how could anyone think up a scene in which an intimate expository letter is read out from the commentators’ box at a public sporting event?
Prit Kamani channels Shah Rukh Khan, actually mimics Dev Anand in a scene (why?) and ceases to have any life of his own after meeting Heer. Divita Juneja is passable in her first film. Umesh Shukla has directed much better films, and really successful plays. Emotional dramas are his forte, how did he direct this dud?
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)