Ekk Deewana Tha

This unusual love story is somehow watchable for holding romance up to reality

There are some lovely visuals in Gautham Menon’s Ekk Deewana Tha, a remake of his own Tamil film, Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa. These are of the backwaters of Alleppey and it is nice to see ‘God’s Own Country’ portrayed so in a Hindi movie. She comes from Alleppey, does Jessie Thekkekutu, and if you didn’t know she was a Malayalee Christian, the movie reminds you of it every ten minutes. That a South Indian director should typecast a character and culture so blithely is a surprise, and it does occasionally grate.

But in other ways, Ekk Deewana Tha is an unusual Hindi movie. It serves you one reality check after another, and tells you that romantic love is often at conflict with the social milieu, yes, but also with  individual personality traits—that lovers sometimes change their minds and check their passions with the passage of time and events.

Sachin (Prateik Babbar) is an assistant on film production and lives in Mumbai in the same building as Jessie (Amy Jackson), a working girl living with her conservative parents. At a certain point in the story, her family’s distaste for Sachin’s profession and their apprehension of a possible inter-religious marriage gets to Jessie, and she agrees to marry a Christian of their choice in Alleppey.

But at the eleventh hour, right at the altar, she dramatically backs away, and this seems a response to both family coercion and her paradoxical nature. Later in the film, she reacts in much the same way to Sachin, inexplicably turning him down too.

The film’s idiosyncratic characters and its peculiarly elliptical  structure at first suggest that one of the lovers is schizophrenic and may be hallucinating the conversations. This could  have been interesting. But it turns out to be just oblique script-writing. 

Though not ‘entertaining’, in the strict sense that we interpret the word in popular culture, Ekk Deewana Tha curiously holds your attention.

Prateik Babbarremakeromance