If the other release of the week, Gangs of Wasseypur split its epic story into two parts that add up to five hours and twenty minutes, this one does exactly the opposite — packs three stories into a 120-minute long film — and yet manages to feel longer than the sum of the Wasseypur films.
Shahid Kapoor has achieved that rare feat of playing a star-crossed lover in back to back films across space (Mausam) and time (Teri Meri Kahaani) and proved that he can actually pick films that are bad no matter where they are set or which period they are set in.
From start to finish, Teri Meri Kahaani is as fake as it gets, a quality that wouldn't have been as frustrating if it didn't happen three times over in the same film! Every location feels gimmicky, costume unrealistically flashy and conflict contrived. With hardly 40 minutes available per story, this could've made for a tight, snappy narrative. But no, even in these 40 minutes, the makers want them to go singing and dancing together... even when the boy is in prison! “Just have the girl enter prison and make someone throw the keys away so that they can sing and dance, yaar.”
In each of the three stories, the boy has a back-up girl, no matter how silly or immature he has been. We are talking about a boy who is juvenile enough to upload pictures of him in bed with his girlfriend and make them public on Facebook with captions ‘Jism’ and ‘Jism 2’!
The makers clearly are not in sync with any of the eras they have portrayed, be it 1910 (The hero from Lahore wishes aloud that we didn’t get freedom lest all the pretty women in his neighbourhood go to Hindustan… except that it wasn’t until 1930 did the Muslim League propose a separate nation) or 2012 (Yo, dudes! The kids these days aren’t stupid enough to live-tweet what they are thinking DURING the date… certainly not stuff like ‘I think she’s cute but she talks too much’.)
The 2012 episode set in Stratford-Upon-Avon (some respect for Shakespeare’s hometown, please?) featuring the modern day Krish, Meera and Radha seems written by a generation that’s never ever touched a computer, let alone mobile phone.
Priyanka Chopra tries hard to sound cute and Shahid Kapoor still gets himself mixed up with Shah Rukh Khan.
Teri Meri Kahaani is so bad that it makes us want to warn you thrice. Skip. Skip. Skip.
Teri Meri Kahaani
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Director: Kunal Kohli
Cast: Shahid Kapoor, Priyanka Chopra, Neha Sharma, Prachi Desai
Storyline: Boy meets, loves and gets girl in three different eras
Bottomline: They haven't figured it out yet themselves, don't blame us
