I Love NY

This movie is clearly a straight lift from a Soviet-era TV film called The Irony of Fate. In that production, a man in Moscow gets drunk with his friends on New Year’s Eve and is mistakenly put on board a flight to Leningrad. He goes to what he thinks is his flat, turns the key in the lock and crashes out in bed.

It is a gentle Russian critique of the dull and uniform Communist architecture of those times. All roads, all buildings in cities were designed in the same box-like construction style, identical in every respect, right down to the key fitting in all the locks of the respective apartment numbers. So, naturally, a mix up takes place, followed by a romance between Mr Moscow and Ms Leningrad.

In I Love NY, Randhir Singh (Sunny Deol) gets drunks with his Punjabi diaspora buddies in Chicago on New Year’s Eve and takes the flight to New York, turns the key in the door of the apartment of Tikku Verma (Kangana Ranaut) and the rest follows as per the blueprint. However, the cinematic style in I Love NY is American screwball comedy of the 1930s and 40s, a genre described by Andrew Sarris as ‘a sex comedy without the sex’.

So there is a lot of talk about love and sex in this movie but absolutely nothing happens. Tikku’s boyfriend, Ishaan (Navin Chowdhry), turns up and wants to know what Randhir is doing in Tikku’s bed. The three go back and forth accusing each other of this, that and the other, but nobody has even the remotest intention of getting it on. Love is only in the bitterly cold air, this New Year’s Eve.

Still, as with the old screwballs, there is a watchable element to the film, and though Sunny Deol is no Cary Grant, Kangana Ranaut does her vulnerable, emotional and lonely single woman act pretty well. Her command over Hindi is such an asset to all her performances.

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Ajit Duara