Someone asks Melvin in the brilliant movie, 'As good as it gets', "How do you write women so well?" His ever insightful answer: "I think of a man and take away reason and accountability."
I read a tweet somewhere that 'Aisha' was a 'Dil Chahta Hai' of girls. The setting and the characters might be similar, and probably so were the ambitions of the makers. But sadly lacking in reason and accountability.
This is true for the writing, the characters, the story and the direction. The film is set in the super-rich society of Delhi where young socialites seem to be doing nothing better than fill their days with mundane things like polo matches and river-rafting. But unlike Dil Chahta Hai where the characters were aspirational, these just turn out to be jokes.
Speaking of jokes, Dil Chahta Hai was a laugh riot. It brought on nostalgia and even moved you to tears in places. The chemistry between the three guys was nothing short of amazing and they came alive on screen as people you would adore to be with. Aisha's jokes are so wannabe funny that you only end up wincing at them.
There are a lot of things that you've seen before and rendered much better than they have been in this film. Clever repartees, a punch to defend a woman's honour, pranks, public confessions of love, childhood friends not knowing they are in love, fights among close friends, self-realizations, among other things are all mixed together in a story supposedly inspired by Jane Austen's Emma. You've seen it all before in Dil Chahta Hai, Jaane tu ya jaane na, Kal ho na ho, and even I hate luv storys. So the story is a sequence of such happenings strung together with neither originality nor effectiveness.
Coming to individual characters, the smaller characters and actors impress a lot more than the leading pair. One due to too much screen time and the other due to too little. Sonam Kapoor in the title role is practically present in every frame of the film and I used to like her before I watched it. She knows what makes her look cute and she keeps batting the eyelids and flashing the pearlies in the same way over and over again. Tiresome. On the other hand, Abhay Deol could have had a lot more substance in the role and would have been able to do justice to it too. Sadly, he is sidelined with too many others around and comes across as half-heartedly there.
Ira Dubey and Cyrus Sahukar as Pinky and Randhir are superb in their roles. But the saving grace of the film is Amrita Puri as Shefali. She is simply outstanding in the way she has delivered her character of a small-town middle-class girl trying to live up to the high society of Delhi.
All in all, Aisha turns out to be a huge disappointment. Would have been better off seeing Dil Chahta Hai for the ninety-seventh time on the DVD.
