I’m not even going to justify my reasons to want to see the film. Hell, we had the lead actors constantly seducing the crap out of us with their smoldering stares from every hoarding and television set for the3 months.
I don’t know how to feel about the film. Those are three sensational looking human beings as leads by the way. AaliaBhat looks like she’s made out of porcelain and her wardrobe loves her. Karan Johar knows how to place a camera in front of a woman to make her look her best. Several people compared AaliaBhat’s Shanaya to Kareena Kapoor’s Poo in Kabhi Khushi kabhi Gham. This comparison might work out to be detrimental to her in the long run. By the time that Kareena Kapoor did Poo, she had already displayed her acting prowess in varied roles in Ajnabee, Asoka and Refugee.
Siddharth Malhotra’s close ups had me reaching for my smelling salts. With those warm, brown eyes he emotes his way into the hearts and pants of women everywhere.
Varun Dhawan’s Rohan grows on you. And it does not hurt that he dances like a dream.
On the flipside, everything about Student of the Year was as subtle as a heart attack. The purported REAL star of the film—director Karan Johar is in fact the weakest performer of the lot. He’s managed to pull a Rajkumar Hirani with a superb ensemble cast, but breaking the fourth wall with them narrating the story to audience was just LAZY. One of the basic tenets of story telling is “Show, don’t tell” and yet Johar has the entire first half TOLD to the audience. Only the dialogues saved the film.
And Johar has often claimed that only he can make the kind of movies he does. He uses the bricks baked in the kilns of female sighs to build factories where boobs don’t acknowledge the existence of gravity, and putting more than 3 Punjabis in a room ends with either a marriage or a MASSIVE round of Antakshari and where Farida Jalal can do no wrong. True enough. But stringing a montage of rich, good looking kids being kinda douchey does not exactly qualify as story telling.
The music of the film is dismal, apart from Radha and Vele (which is stuck in my head right now. Goddamit), everything seemed to be some dhinchak-ed version of an old song. And of course, IshqWala Love had a better parody than the actual song.
Here’s the video for those of you living under a rock.
But where SOTY fails is in giving the audience something to hold onto. There are characters, but no moments in the film. Within 15 minutes of walking out of the film, I had forgotten 90% of it already. And because there were so many protagonists one didn’t know who to side with. First half, you love the “Bata kabaccha”—Abhimanyu (Malhotra) for the sincerity of his intentions, but the second half belongs to the poor Rohan (Dhawan) who gets fucked over by his best friend, girl friend and family in a span of minutes. Also, there was no antagonist. Everyone was flawed, and aggressively so. There’s nothing wrong with flawed characters, but when you place them in a 1 dimensional world where everything is black or white, then it takes very little for the viewer to switch off.
Watch Student of the Year, coz it’s what the cool kids are doing these days.