‘Wedding Anniversary’ Review: Pretentious and shoddy (Rating: *)

By Troy Ribeiro

Film: "Wedding Anniversary"

Director: Shekhar S. Jha

Cast: Mahie Gill, Nana Patekar, Priyanshu Chatterjee and Yatin Karyekar

Rating: *

"Wedding Anniversary" is about a couple -- Kahani (Mahie Gill) and Nirbhay (Priyanshu Chatterjee) -- who met a year ago in Goa, fell in love and got married and are celebrating their first wedding anniversary in Goa.

Enthusiastic and deeply in love with her beau, Kahani gets herself ready for the great day, makes arrangements to make their anniversary special with all her husband's favourite things. In a bid to improve their life through better job prospects, her husband who is to join her, misses his flight to meet his prospective employers for a lucrative job and is unable to make it in time for their anniversary celebrations.

A disappointed and hurt Kahani embarks upon a journey of self-realisation and discovery with her favourite author, Nagarjuna (Nana Patekar) as she waits for her husband. This essentially forms the crux of this convoluted film with confused messages.

Amateurishly and poorly handled, writer-director Shekhar S. Jha attempts to make a love story with abstract undertones, supposedly replete with life lessons and love, but the end product is bizarrely handled. The dialogues are verbose, cliche-ridden and boring.

The characters are one-dimensional and poorly etched, devoid of reality and the situations forcefully concocted and jarring. The film lacks drama or a soul and fails to engage you at all. It is almost like watching a badly made play with actors indulging in third-rate histrionics.

The performances are equally mediocre and do not contribute in even the smallest way to lift a poorly written script and screenplay. Each character merely mouths cumbersome dialogues in a bid to sound knowledgeable.

Mahie Gill as Kahani is fake and theatrical, without an iota of realism in her performance. Nana Patekar as Nagarjuna, the writer, is his usual self, eccentric and full of idiosyncrasies and his performance makes for tedious viewing. Priyanshu Chatterjee, Yatin Karyekar are wasted in one-scene roles which could have been essayed by just anyone.

Nowhere does the film establish the antecedents of the characters, their families or milieu. They just appear from nowhere, render a tacky scene and disappear.

The production values are mediocre and the music, cinematography too are nothing to write home about.

Overall, "Wedding Anniversary" is a poorly made film which drags and tests the viewer's patience beyond measure.