We have often moaned and groaned about the severe lack of good “female bonding” films in India. Along comes Jia Aur Jia that makes you wish you hadn’t grumbled about the deficiency — better nothing than this. In what would, perhaps, be the most inane film out this year, the script is more immature than a kindergarten school exercise. There is dullness and daftness written all over. The characters, situations, relationships — absolutely nothing works.
Jia Aur Jia seems to have been made primarily for justifying the sponsored Sweden Tourism outing and to somehow shove in the remixed version of the song ‘ Jiya o jiya kuchh bol do ’ from the 1961 Dev Anand-Asha Parekh starrer Jab Pyar Kisi Se Hota Hai.
So you have two Jia-s (Kalki Koechlin and Richa Chadda) thrown together on a “twin-share” holiday (whatever that be) in Sweden because of “insufficient funds”. The fact is both look rather affluent, living in fancy designer homes, wearing fancier designer clothes. Ok let’s not carp too much about lack of logic when there’s hardly any present, anyway.
Coming back to the Jia-s, both have “poles apart” personalities that make them fight a little and eventually come peacefully together in friendship. One is outgoing, vivacious, bubbly and chirpy and, in keeping with the time-honoured tradition of Hindi cinema, she also has to have some tragedy and tears to hide behind the laughter. But that, and Koechlin’s desperately spontaneous performance, can’t make us forgive how ditzy her Jia is, be it cracking some juvenile jokes on a long distance flight or pouring vodka instead of water in her travel companion’s eyes. The other Jia has an equally unconvincing betrayal backstory. Leave alone empathise or sympathise you can’t even engage with either. And, yes, there is a token man also thrown in, that too of Indo-Swede descent called Vasu Krishna Bergman.
The film can’t even be effective with the safely manipulative and emotional tragic angle thrown in towards the end, in fact it manages to turn it also into an utterly laughable device. And then there are bits about liver donation and transplant — so dim-witted, illiterate and ill-informed that they will leave you squirming with your palm resolutely planted on your face.
