Pyaar Impossible!: A review

With just over half an hour left of the 150-minute movie, Uday Chopra, who’s also written the script of the film, finally comes to the point. He dresses up Priyanka Chopra as a geek and challenges her to get the phone number of any of the happening guys in the party para of Singapore. His theory: Love and attraction are only for the beautiful people of the world.

Dressed in a dull jumper (she uses to clean computers with), school hair clips and thick oversized glasses, Piggychops prances around what looks like the Clarke Quay area of Lion City. And while the film forces its point — no guy even looks at her properly — you sitting in the audience cannot take your eyes off the lady. Just like you have drooled over her for the rest of the movie when the Desi Girl was hanging around in minis and microminis, tanks and tees.

The Jugal Hansraj-directed Pyaar Impossible! is a very Bollywoody live action version of Shrek, just that Shrek was a million times more fun.

Abhay Sharma (Uday) is Mr Shrek here — he is not green, he is a geek! He has a Steve Jobs poster on his door, his father drinks coffee from a cup with an Albert Einstein sticker and he has invented an operating system which can work with any system. So what if he calls it a software!

And the Mac man is still in love with PC — that rockstar princess from college called Alisha. She didn’t even know of his existence on campus, despite he having saved her from drowning, but saat saal baad his love stays undiminished.

Alisha, the wise girl that she is, hasn’t wasted time. She got married straightaway, had a kid within a year, got divorced and moved to Singapore with her daughter.

So when Dino Morea (now in his second innings, playing cameos, like Rahul Khanna) steals Abhay’s software, Mr Nerd chases Mr Suave down to, well of course, Singapore. And thanks to Bollywood’s golden rule of misunderstanding, he becomes, hold your breath, a nanny(!) in Alisha’s home, taking care of her bratty six-year-old daughter Tanya (the child actor is as infuriatingly irritating as the Cheeni Kum girl). To rub it all in, the girl, who would soon become Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’s Anjali and help Abhay get Alisha, calls the ‘naukrani man’ Froggy and even writes it, Deewar-style, on his forehead! Remember the fairytale The Frog Prince?

The problem with Pyaar Impossible!, like many Yash Raj Films movies in the recent past, is that the sub-plots are fleshed out into full-fledged plots and the main movie gets lost. What could have been a simple beauty-and-the geek love story meanders aimlessly and by the time the central idea takes off, the damage has been done. You are too tired to care and just hope that the Idiot Plot — Hollywood term for movies where one word or sentence could clear everything up — comes to an end.

Uday Chopra had the right intentions. The funnyman from the Dhoom films realises that with all the Shahids and Ranbirs around, for him to make a mark as a leading man he has to highlight his gawkiness in the script. But unfortunately the much-publicised rewrites have led nowhere because besides a couple of sequences — the ‘Thai tradition’ dinner and the nighttime walk-the-talk — this rom com is neither fully rom nor really com.

The only reason you should dream of a date with Pyaar Impossible! is the eminently edible Priyanka Chopra. She not only looks stunning throughout the film but Piggychops’s acting chops keep getting better with every outing. Let’s just say, she is not going out of ‘fashion’ in a hurry.

The screenplay may be tedious but the frames are easy on the eye, thanks to Santosh Thundiyil’s lenswork. And Salim-Sulaiman does rustle up some very cool tracks to ease your agony.

With Holmes playing on the neighbouring screen and the mighty Khans lined up in the coming weeks, you should ideally wait for Pyaar Impossible! to come out on DVD.

Unless, of course, PC is on your menu.


Pratim D. Gupta, t2