Cousins And Buddies:
A simplified version of Anjali Menon’s Malayalam film, Bangalore Days, Yaariyan 2, directed by Radhika Rao and Vinay Sapru is a collection of music videos with a bare minimum plot to glue them together.
In music videos (many of which the directors have made) romance is usually filtered into primary emotions — mainly joy and heartbreak, so the film also follows the highs and lows of three cousins played by three generically good-looking actors who deliver the bare minimum required of them. When they do try heavy-duty emotional scenes they invariably overdo it.
Laadli (Divya Khosla Kumar) who had directed the first film), agrees to an arranged marriage (because she has a medical history, see?) to a morose-looking Abhay (Yash Dasgupta) and moves from Simla to Mumbai, where she connects with her cousins.
Shikhar (Meezan Jafri), with daddy issues, is a biker, who is barred from competing in races and goes into a massive sulk. He falls for a girl in a wheelchair (Anaswara Rajam) who is grieving her dead boyfriend. Bajrang (Pearl V. Puri) falls in love with an airline stewardess (Warina Hussain) and is ditched, literally left midair holding the ring.
It takes a while for Laadli described as “Chrismas Tree and sparkly” to discover why her unsmiling husband ignores her. Till then the three prance around the city and when needed provide BFF kind of unstinting support.
There are enough tears shed to drown a small village. To the credit of the film, the three love stories are not the overused, overdone type. The film is shot with the bright colours of a festival advertisement. And there is a song for every occasion, if it is happy number, there is dancing too. The music is pleasant enough while it is playing on screen, but no tune sticks in the mind. Films of this genre used to be made in the Eighties and Nineties, but the songs are still played on retro FM channels. T-Series had the hit formula then, and Yaariyan 2 does evoke a tinge of nostalgia for the time when music (and lip sync songs) used to be the mainstay of a commercial film. Simple love stories are hardly made these days, and if they are greenlit, the end up on OTT.
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)
