Jawaani Jaaneman

JAWAANI JAANEMAN is a remake of an Italian film. The plot is promising and could have made for a hilarious and touching entertainer. The screenplay however is inconsistent and weak at many places. Only some scenes work and provide laughs. Hussain Dalal and Abbas Dalal's dialogues are witty and try their best to enhance the impact. Nitin Kakkar's direction is average. He doesn’t keep the flow of the film organic. Some developments happen suddenly, be it Jazz developing feelings for Rhea (Kubbra Sait) or Jazz asking Tiya to shift in his house. These scenes are still digestible. But a scene in the second half where a local randomly accuses Jazz of cheating him in a property deal comes out of nowhere. Till now, viewers knew Jazz as a lazy worker but not someone who is deceitful. Hence, this revelation seems bizarre. On the positive side, he gets the emotion and humour right in some scenes.

Is this the movie’s way of bringing Jazz back into the family fold (bad boy turning into a responsible, nappy-changing man), or is this the character’s arc in the original source material? (Apparently, Jawaani is a remake of a Western rom-com, which is perhaps why it feels like a Holly-Bolly movie, in the way the characters speak). The post-interval whiff of moralizing finger-wagging makes Jawaani dip, as well as the many too-convenient dispatching of potentially thorny problems: there are contrivances here which don’t all ring true. There’s also a scene with racist overtones: in a movie which is trying to strike a non-judgemental gong for babies out of wedlock, it is off-putting.