Do Lafzon Ki Kahani: A boring love story

Banalities abound in this pedestrian romantic tale of a street fighter and a blind girl

Randeep Hooda plays a brooding street fighter who falls for a sightless Jenny, played by Kajal Agarwal—Photo: Special arrangement

Randeep Hooda is getting into the habit of trying to stretch himself to the utmost as an actor. Unfortunately, in films that don’t quite deserve it. No wonder the effort shows, and how. After getting emaciated in Sarbjit , Hooda breaks his lovely nose and disfigures his pretty face in Do Lafzon Ki Kahani . But, instead of gushing over his performance, you end up wondering: why the hell should he be trying so hard?

In the second South Korean remake of the week — this one is based on a 2011 film, Always — you have Hooda play the brooding street fighter Sooraj, who is perennially bashing and getting bashed, giving and receiving blows, breaking bones, gushing blood. All of it is far from India, in Kuala Lumpur. There he bumps into a sightless Jenny (Kajal Agarwal) who, in the time-honoured tradition of blind girls in Hindi films, has huge, round, beautiful, unblemished eyes, much like Kajol in Fanaa or Rameshwari in Sunayana . She has a father who looks Malay and a mother we see in a haze and are unable to figure out the nationality. But Jenny is quite a sanskari girl, obsessed with “desis” to the extent that she “watches” Indian TV serials and mopes along fetchingly.

So they fall in love. As they were always meant to. Though all along you wonder what he found likeable in the utterly self-righteous, virtuous and boring woman. Soon enough he realises that their destinies had always been curiously entwined and he gets back to the arena (he had to give that up after a major betrayal) to be able to pay for her corneal transplant. Ten days is all Jenny has to recover her eyesight or else it will be lost forever, warns the doctor, mouthing the familiar

filmi medical mumbo jumbo.

There are a string of other inconsequential characters strewn all over the utterly disjointed, unformed and yawn-inducing narrative. Looking back I am wondering who of those would I give the worst performance award to: the loud fight club boss Anil George (who was so good in

Miss Lovely and Mardani ), the pony-tailed guy who appears at the fag end of the film and who Hooda mistakes for Agarwal’s suitor or the Chinese villain who hams brilliantly to put any Indian actor to shame, and in the process also ends up being more a comedian than the menacing rapist he was meant to be.

Do Lafzon Ki Kahani is way too pedestrian. The mushy tagline doesn’t help either: “Love never hurts… Love heals.” To that, I would have added “Love bores to tears.”

There are a string of inconsequential characters strewn all over the yawn-inducing narrative

Do Lafzon Ki Kahani

Director: Deepak Tijori

Starring: Randeep Hooda, Kajal Agarwal

Run time: 128 mins