This is what you call a memorable film! A piece of art one is unlikely to forget any time soon. After all, it isn’t everyday that we see Kalki Koechlin and Richa Chadha in a bad film, portraying terrible characters and being totally obnoxious.
First-time director Howard Rosemeyer takes the idea of female bonding and a trip to a foreign land – with the whole road travel motif thrown in – and butchers it to death!
I have lost count of the number of times I have recoiled looking at the screen. In question are two Jias who decide to take a budget trip to Sweden and end up being travel buddies.
Though the extravaganzas and impromptu shopping sprees they keep indulging in never once suggests any sort of “paise kam hain” type problem, but we soon learn to stop looking for logic in such trying times. It is evident from the opening scene itself that both have nothing in common except for their name. Richa Chadha’s Jia is a frigid unsmiling woman with, if I may add, zero dress sense. Kalki Koechlin plays her Jia in the most in-your-face, I-drink-and-smoke-all-the-time manner.
Jia 1 and 2 are not even cardboard characters because that would attribute them too much depth!
So Jia 1 is depressed and Jia 2 too happy. Both have a “dukh bhari daastan” that they don’t want to share. Yay, friendship goals! One wants to die, the other wants to live and they come together to sing “Girls just wanna have fun”. Seriously, they actually do that after they befriend a desi boy in pardes and just like that, stick together.
Arsalan Goni’s character is called Vasu, who is very much at home here because really, no one is actually acting – not Richa, and certainly not Kalki.
It’s just 93 minutes long but this non-existent screenplay is stretched and dragged in all sorts of irrelevant directions. Jia 2 teaches Jia 1 a thing or two about living it to the fullest and there is the whole Rajesh Khanna’s Anand hangover. Basically, we are just appalled by this utter nonsense.
I think when people who consume trash Bollywood all the time finally take a dump, this is what happens – Jia aur Jia. My kind deed for today is telling you not to be fooled by Kalki or Richa’s face on the poster. This film is plain tacky.
Half a Quint out of 5.
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