Uninteresting story, flat jokes

There are many occasions in this three-tiered love story when the two protagonists simply run out of words as the dialogue slumps into an embarrassing silence.

This, you feel, is very much in character. On paper, I am sure Teri Meri Kahaani must have seemed like a terrific 3-in-1. A sumptuous feast of role and accent transference for the charming pair. Shahid Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra are among the best talent we have today. They are versatile, confident, good-looking and simply cool. Director Kunal Kohli gives them three different love stories to sink their decalcified teeth into.

The problem starts early. none of the three stories is inspired or even interesting. The highpoints in each story are so weak we don’t know when they arrive. Some of the material that has gone into telling the triple-tiered story frankly appears to be a secret joke where the punchline is known only to the writers.

For example in the segment in London 2011 Shahid and Priyanka are named Krish and

Radha and the screechy girl who comes in-between them (Neha Sharma) is, believe it or not, Meera.

This self-consciously mythologized modern day love triangle prompts a friend of the hero to quip, “Yeh Radha aur Krishna ke beech mein Meera kahan se aa gayi?” the recreate the celluloid version of a high school play where the props are borrowed from the furniture-wali aunty’s store.

Well, LOL to that. Krish and Radha often resort to smileys and LOLs to express their growing fondness. The smileys remain singularly isolated in their amusement. There is not a moment when we empathise with the protagonists or feel the intended flow of their love for one another. What we see are two stars trying to breathe life into a mutual affection that never quite takes off.

And by the way the Lata Mangeshkar-Kishore Kumar duet Likha hai tere ankhon mein from the Dev Anand starrer Teen Deviyaan which plays in the background in a street scene featuring Shahid and Prachi Desai, did not exist in 1960. It came five years later.

That brings us to the music and choreography, so essential to evoking periodicity specially when the lead pair dances so well. But getting Shahid to do Shammi Kapoor? Bad idea. Very bad idea. Shahid’s measured steps would have made shammi LOL.

And we aren’t talking about his tractor.

The attempts in the pre-Partition segment to instil a sense of patriotic pride, is shamefully baggy. The Gora Log are played by junior artistes whose only credential to represent British India is the colour of their skin. The patriotic Indians get to shout Vande Mataram in freshly-stitched kurtas and tops. Mercifully we are spared a re-mix.

With a kind of brisk business-like immediacy and the least amount of fuss, Maximum takes us into the world of shootout killings and the internecine war in Mumbai’s police department which threatens to destroy the very institution built to mend the wounds and fissures in the social fabric.

Writer-director Kabeer Kaushik seems to be a born minimalist. His earlier film Saher was also steeped in the khaki colour. In Maximum the world of legally-enforced corruption is created with such a lack of backprojection, history and vocalized subtexts that you often feel the director takes his audience for granted.

This is not the case. Kaushik presumes that we are intelligent enough to enter the murky morally ambivalent world of his characters without being led by the hand.

Naseeruddin Shah, who plays a ruthless encounter cop Arun Inamdar, is introduced to us when a victim lies bleeding in front of the cop. Characteristically the director plunges into the scene of crime when the dark deed is done. We see Inamdar watching the victim bleed to death and then pumping two bullets into the chap to ensure there’s no unfinished business here.

This is a world of unmitigated

It gets worse. The two other stories are even less engaging. The one set in the film industry resorts to painstaking periodicity to recreate Mumbai in 1960. A tram crosses Mumbai’s heartland. To his credit the art designer tries hard to get the exteriors right. Though some of it is so shallow you feel Kunal Kohli is attempting immorality. Bullets are fired not to stop but to merchanidise crime. And the lawmakers are shown to be as corrupt as the ones they set out to nab and mend.

Pratap Pandit, as played by Sonu Sood, is a man of a few words, much action. We are not given a chance to know him closely. He shifts gears so often we’re left looking briefly at gaping wounds that can never heal in our socio-political system.

The narration assumes a peculiar pace. As guns roar and Daniel George plays out an elegiac evocative background score to underline the senselessness of the violence, we can see the characters’ self imposed emptiness in the face of the volatile noise that they’ve created around their lives. The hollowness hits you in the head more than the heart. And when the emotions seize the plot in a vice-like grip we feel terribly sorry for the characters for the death trap that they’ve built for one another and finally themselves.

The film opens in 2003 at the height of the encounter killings in Mumbai. Two encounter specialists played by Sonu and Naseer are at loggerheads.

Admirably the director doesn’t use the two principal characters to form a central conflict. Kaushik’s narration is as ruthless and stripped of

The worst story of the three is the one set in pre-Partition Punjab. It almost seems to spoof Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s 1942: A Love Story. Like Anil Kapoor in Chopra’s film, Shahid cares not a hoot about India’s independence. He cares only about “love-shove”. And please take the ‘shove’ seriously. The grinning rogue likes to put it in wherever he gets space. humour and other sources of cinematic solace as the world his characters inhabit. A certain amount of familiarity with the world of encounter killings is assumed on the audiences’ part. We are expected to understand the subverted value-system of the encounter cops who do their social cleansing and in the process get so embroiled in blood, their hands are soaked in the very blood that they are meant to wash away.

The clothes suggest a close affinity between boutique wisdom and periodicity. And that seems to be the prevalent mood of the romance. The emotions seem to be obtained off the shelf. Priyanka and Shahid struggle hard to look deeply interested in the lines and in each other.

It’s a losing battle. There’s only so much you can do with conspicuously corny lines like, “Are we like those couples who talk on the sms and online and have nothing to say when they come face to face?”

Even if they are, do we care?

Just why Kunal Kohli, a director