Dil Dhadakne Do: Dil did not beat enough

Starring: Anil Kapoor, Shefali Shah, Priyanka Chopra, Ranveer Singh, Anushka Sharma, Farhan Akhtar, Rahul Bose, Zarina Wahab
Rated: 6/10
Zoya Akhtar is fast becoming the travel specialist of Bollywood — at least on screen — someone like Yash Chopra though in a modern, somewhat snappish romantic mould. Since the days of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, she has seasoned her art of making her movies travel the world and Dil Dhadakne Do is cast on the ethereal waters of Mediterranean Greece.
Like the Chopras, this one too is picture perfect, a visual treat and an enhanced show of chic not just in relationships but in clothes, personality propulsion and in treating the characters and their stories in the rarified atmosphere of envied richness.
In Zindagi... that worked wonders — the road trip through Spain, the untapped locales, the modernisms in the characters, the tomatino festival, the bullfights, the colour, the wine and the romance of Spain. In Dil Dhadakne Do, Zoya tries to be with her promise of romancing through a capsule of life rolling in swish money, cruises, destination anniversaries and power women still under the grip of patriarchal woes.
The universal complaint against her in this one would be that she did not allow dil to dhadakne do. She gives a dent to spontaneity of the storyline, turns too slow in proceedings and gives out a slice of life which is neither complete romance nor complete strife. The middle path might do her in and that would be a pity for such an emerging director of worth. The multi-starrer though is no damp squib. There are lots of moments in it but they get lost in the duration of proceedings.
There’s more stress than romance in the goings-on and wherever there is potential of romance, Zoya somehow misses the point. There’s this thing brewing between Priyanka Chopra and Farhan Akhtar and it could have turned the film around but Zoya keeps going in the wrong direction. Strangely, there is more chemistry between and footage accorded to Ranveer and Priyanka as brother-sister than, say, Ranveer and Anushka as lovers or Farhan and Priyanka as could-be lovers. Very overtly, this amazing brother-sister camaraderie seems autobiographical — about her cool relationship with her sibling Farhan.
The dysfunctional family of the Mehras, their corporate concerns, their marriages of convenience, their artificial society, their this, that and the other — there’s too much about marital issues than about actual love. Anushka is wasted as is the cool dude Farhan.
But amid all this, there is a stunner in Priyanka who comes off as a supermodel from theVogue cover. She is so much of a fashion statement that Anushka looks drab before her.
One wishes that Anil Kapoor-Shefali Shah (brilliant) marital blues had not doused the colour of the azure waters of the Mediterranean Sea which are best when they run into pulsating love — and not get stuck in the aftermath of it. 
Source: Sunday Pioneer, 7 June, 2015

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