How do you invest in a love story where you neither understand why the two people fall for each other nor figure out why they eventually grow apart? Well, that’s exactly the challenge this film throws at us.
It’s called Jalebi - The Everlasting Taste of Love, and it’s important to not be fooled by the name.
Riddled with cliches, stereotypes and cringeworthy acting, ‘Jalebi’ can really test your patience.
We are greeted with a loud wail right at the start of the movie. That high pitch cry belongs to Aisha Pradhan, played by Rhea Chakraborty, who talks about being suicidal and is visibly nursing a broken heart. Details follow soon after as a train trip to Delhi triggers a stream of memories.
Aisha is now a best-selling author going to Delhi. She shares her berth with a young mother (Digangana Suryavanshi) and her daughter, and soon figures out that the woman is actually the wife of her own ex-husband, Dev (Varun Mitra)!
With one flashback after another, we piece together their love story and unhappy breakup. This is how it goes:
Aisha meets Dev in Purani Dilli.
He is conducting a heritage tour that culminates with shudh Mathur ghar ka khana at his netaji-ki-haveli residence. A couple of songs later the two get married but realise soon enough that they want different things from life, and the rift only widens with time.
Aisha is ‘modern’, because she wears shorts and smokes. Dev is conservative because he likes purani dilli ki galiyan.
When will Bollywood grow up, really?
What could have been a sensitive and mature movie about modern day relationships and the pulls and pressures of young love, gets subsumed with unnecessary melodrama.
Based on the unbearably regressive Bengali film Praktan starring Prosenjit Chatterjee and Rituparna Sengupta, while Jalebi thankfully steers clear of the sexism, it remains a confusing mess.
Rhea Chakraborty plays mostly teary-eyed Aisha and is always fuming at what she considers pyaar mein dhoka.
Varun Mitra sadly gets a raw deal as Dev is never allowed to be anything more than a cardboard character.
The train journey also has other passengers that we briefly focus on, but these hardly have any impact on how the movie proceeds. There’s an elderly couple missing their NRI grandchild and a newly married much-in-love couple. Even Arjun Kanungo is roped in to play a heartbroken lover who channelises his dard and sings his favourite romantic song.
The story is still stubbornly static.
Jalebi remains on the surface throughout and remains a futile exercise in trying to understand modern love. 1.5 Quints out of 5!
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)