Love makes the world go round in confoundingly concentric circles in Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari. Given full on flippant treatment, the caprices and convolutions of the Varun Dhawan-Janhvi Kapoor starrer have a free run of the field.
The film revolves around four young people who are surrounded by families at variance with their choices. The quartet finds itself on a wild merry-go-round of break-ups, hook-ups and matrimonies.
The cross-connections threaten to short-circuit the well laid-out plans of two of them – they are set to wed with pomp and show – as well as the other two, who are out to scuttle the grand nuptials staged in a sprawling luxury hotel in Udaipur where amour and anger cross paths.
Making sense of the goings-on takes some doing as much for the characters involved in the maddening mayhem caused by matters of the heart run amok as for the audience seeking to penetrate the pulpy core of the film.
When a film is about a bunch of whimsical youngsters who fall in and out of love in the course of a handful of days and outdo each other in finding ways to tie themselves up in knots, the writing has to be topnotch for all of it to make a solid landing. Much of it is wayward, if not entirely pointless.
Produced by Dharma Productions and writer-director Shashank Khaitan's Mentor Disciple Entertainment, Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari is crammed with the bells and whistles of a glossy rom-com that sees value in pulling out all the stops.
The fact that it rarely slows down leaves it gasping for breath more frequently than is good for it. But take the film as 135 minutes of harmless, unbridled fun that also throws in a few pearls of wisdom about parents, patriarchy, the tyranny of socially-enforced gender roles and marriages made in hell, the concoction is mildly diverting without being strikingly illuminating.
Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari is woven around a big fat wedding complete with songs, swimming pool shenanigans, a raucous sundowner, a wildlife safari during which no leopard is spotted, let alone harmed, and lovers buffeted by heartbreaks, jealousies and confusions that deepen with each little thrust of Cupid's awry arrow.
Sunny (Varun Dhawan), a jeweller's drifter-son who, a la Amarendra Baahubali, believes in rough and ready methods of sweeping a woman off her feet (he also occasionally seeks to channel his inner Shahrukh Khan), and Tulsi Kumari (Janhvi Kapoor), a staid, unassuming schoolteacher, are dumped by their respective partners before they can exchange marital vows.
As luck would have it – the contrivance is intriguing but does not yield the sort of payoff one would expect from the off-kilter premise – the ones who have done the ditching decide to get married to each other in a long drawn-out ceremony that constitutes a large swathe of the film.
Vikram Singh (Rohit Saraf), a wealthy garment exporter's mild-mannered son, has left Tulsi in the lurch after being with her for 12 years. Ananya (Sanya Malhotra), on her part, has summarily spurned Sunny's marriage proposal and opted to move on.
The jilted Sunny reaches out to distraught Tulsi and enthuses her to gatecrash the event and wreak vengeance on their ex-es. They barge in on a mission to thwart the wedding. They do manage to put a huge spanner in the works of the about-to-be-married couple but what they think up on the go invariably comes back to pinch and bite them.
The chaos that ensues overruns the four as they work at cross-purposes and struggle to find their way out of tricky situations that are either of their own making or a consequence of matters that are beyond their control.
Vikram Singh's standoffish relatives add to the confusion with their conservative notions about family honour and marital unions, with the groom's elder brother, Param Singh (Akshay Oberoi), being the worst offender. When push comes to shove, it is with Param, whose wife is an unhappy soul for obvious reasons, that Sunny has to scuffle with.
The Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari plot is a rigmarole without end that is meant to be mirthful. Parts of the film are funny all right, but the flimsy and frivolous foundation on which the lightweight narrative stands often gives way to wobbly passages.
The actors give it all they have but since the screenplay is unable to give them all they need, their efforts are, at best, inconsistent. Janhvi Kapoor skirts around the pitfalls and provides the film its more sprightly moments.
She fleshes out a charmingly clueless girl who is desperate to win back the boy she has lost without being able to fully fathom why. She holds the crucial segments of the film together although her character's backstory of a broken family and an estranged mother is skimmed over.
Varun Dhawan, in his third outing with Shashank Khaitan after the two Dulhania films (Humpty Sharma and Badrinath), is far less impactful. As a guy bruised by rejection in love and plotting revenge, the actor is called upon to do a lot of the heavy lifting. He creaks under the weight of the repetitive loop that the film falls into.
Rohit Saraf delivers a steady performance as the scion of a business family who is not as complicated as the rest of his clan. Sanya Malhotra, despite being saddled with an underwritten character, always puts her best foot forward.
The title gives away the ending of the film. How Sunny and Tulsi make their way into each other's orbit and heart adds up to a winding, perplexing and eventually comforting love story that would have been a whole lot more enjoyable, and infinitely funnier, had it shed some of its flab.
As things stand, Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari is more froth than fizz.
-
Varun Dhawan, Janhvi Kapoor, Sanya Malhotra, Rohit Saraf, Maniesh Paul