Dull, duller, dullest

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In Love Breakups Zindagi, nubile Naina (Dia Mirza), a Mumbai girl, is en route to Chandigarh by bus, to attend her BFF Gayatri’s wedding. Riding along with her in the shaadi bus are two Delhi boys, the groom’s friends — Jai (Zayed Khan) and Govind (Cyrus Sahukar). Naina needs to go pee, but since there is no loo with a flush and bushes are not safe for peeing women, she asks the boys to stand guard at a safe distance, facing the other way. Yada yada yada, and Naina is going about her business, when she suddenly calls out from the bushes, requesting the boys to sing. They are gobsmacked, but oblige.

Help me out, please. Why did Naina ask Jai and Govind to sing? Was she going to let out a fart and wanted to drown out the noise? Or was she used to her mother/father/boyfriend singing while peeing and couldn’t do it without...? Why? What for the singing? The film doesn’t explain.
There’s a lot of baffling stuff in Love Breakups Zindagi which could have very easily told its story in 20 minutes flat, but insists on going on and on because of a) the incredible stupidity of its two lead characters, and b) the unimaginative director who shoves in every type of creature and scene ever used in a rom-com.

Naina is in a relationship with Dhruv (Vaibhav Talwar). She’s the creative artist sort who scribbles corny Hallmark messages on the walls of her house. Stuff like, “If he comes back to you he is yours...” Why she does that is not explained, but as the film pans out we figure it’s because the poor thing is extraordinarily dim. Though she tells us that she likes reading Arundhati Roy and pretends to have clicked National Geographic type of photographs, she can’t figure why her boyfriend never makes her happy. She also can’t understand why, after returning from Chandigarh, her mind keeps going back to those happy, bouncy days with Jai. Or why, when Dhruv proposes, her heart sinks and the world seems a really dark place.
She can’t figure that Dhruv, a dry, boring, corporate shorty, is just, well, a corporate type who is dry, boring and short. So Shabana Azmi has to get on the phone, pretending to be her mommy, and tell Naina to listen to her heart, not dimag. Only if.
Jai is also dense, though little less than Naina. He is in a relationship with a dominatrix (Pallavi Sharda). Dominatrix is sexy, but Jai’s ghanti doesn’t go off when he sees her. Instead it scurries around in panic, looking for a place to hang itself. He knows this and has been contemplating stuff.
When his ghanti rings and keeps on ringing, just thinking of the days he spent with Naina in Chandigarh, he dumps Dominatrix but does nothing else. Shah Rukh Khan has to come, wriggle his face this way and that, and tell Jai that he should, you know, tell Naina that she rings his ghanti.
What do you think should happen after both Shabana and Shah Rukh have said their piece? In normal films lovers would rush over and profess. Not here. Love Breakups Zindagi drags on and on, making Jai and Naina go on a Mumbai darshan, and then returns to watch Naina and Dhruv have awkward moments. Then it goes off to Delhi, to check out how
Jai’s twice-divorced friend Govind is doing with Urdu professor, Sheela Massi (Tisca Chopra).

Love Breakups Zindagi is not a rom-com, but a rom-cat — rom as in romantic, and cat as in catastrophe.
The film has single-note characters who have been given the dullest possible dialogues. The Punjabi wedding banter and nachna-tapna is soulless, and stock scenes from Hollywood about people having fun — running on the beach, chucking paint on walls, cuddling lost dogs — make you want to go hang with the ghanti.
Though Dia Mirza appears in gorgeous Ritu Kumar creations, and she and Zayed are nice human specimens, both have no acting skills whatsoever. They also lack vigour and generally come across as birdbrained.
The film — acting, direction, scenes, characters, story — is so inept that often I thought I was watching the dress rehearsal.
If there is a saving grace it is Cyrus Sahukar. He has half-decent lines and his deadpan delivery is nice. But when he and Tisca Chopra go on dates to the Rail Museum and get wet and eat Maggi, I wanted to throw up.