Dono Review: Too Antiseptic To Be The Modern Film It Wants To Be

Rajveer Deol and Paloma Dhillon in a song from the movie. (Courtesy: YouTube)

With nary an ounce of freshness in its narrative ingredients, Dono is a watery broth that seeks to carry the Rajshri Productions legacy forward while trying to deliver a modern love story about young people dealing with heartbreak, the process of healing and the act of finding closure. It falls between two stools never to get back on its two wobbly feet.

Dono launches the careers of as many as three industry kids – the two lead actors, Sunny Deol’s son Rajveer Deol and Poonam Dhillon’s daughter Paloma Dhillon, and the film’s director, Sooraj Barjatya’s son Avnish Barjatya. They aren’t exactly out of their depths in this shallow affair but nor are they on a red-hot streak in a lukewarm film.

The first-time director ensures that Dono isn’t low on glitz and gloss – that, of course, is easy to achieve – and the two young leads, working within the limitations of a scrappy screenplay (Barjatya and Manu Sharma) that is caught between two eras of Hindi cinema, do all that they can to liven up proceedings. But nothing they bring to the table is enough to help the film snap out of its unevenness.

Dono never breaks free from old habits emphatically enough to be able to soar. It is pretty to look at all right but difficult to digest. A dreary narrative, unimaginative writing, uninspired performances and a shallow plot that never springs to life offset all the pulchritude of the people and places that the film seeks to get some purchase from.

Rajveer Deol is Dev Saraf, who runs a floundering start-up in Bengaluru. Paloma Dhillon is Meghna Doshi, who has just broken up from her boyfriend of six years. The girl Dev silently loves, Alina Jaisingh (Kanikka Kapur), is getting married to Nikhil Kothari (Rohan Khurana). Dev is emotionally down in the dumps.

It is at the big fat destination wedding in Thailand – an endless series of rituals that stretch the film to an unconscionable two and a half hours as the two families, their friends and the in-and-out-of-love youngsters (serving as clotheshorses for colour-coordinated lehengas, ghagras and saafas) plunge into the merriments of the moment – that Dev and Meghna meet.

This is all tantamount to a half-hearted revival of Hum Aapke Hain Koun, the 1994 Sooraj Barjatya film that set the template for all wedding dramas to come. Dono is delivered in a new bottle that cannot hide the fact that it isn’t really new.

Dono pretty much follows the same HAHK playbook but aspires to be regarded as a contemporary film with its sensibilities rooted in a mix modernity and tradition in which the latter outweighs the former. But this consciously chaste concoction never strays too far from Rajshri territory because the hangover of past successes is never easy to shake off.

Dev is a reluctant guest at Alina’s wedding. He has been invited by the bride, a girl he has had a crush on ever since he can remember but has been unable to tell her that he loves her. He seeks closure. Meghna is a friend of the bridegroom, whose best friend Gaurav Shah (Aditya Nanda), is her ex. She is here to show the guy she has dumped that she has moved on.

Once the stage is set – nothing in the film is sharply delineated and the dramatis personae hem and haw their way through all the complications that follow – the rigmarole begins. Love blossoms between Dev and Meghna but the path forward is uncertain for the twosome. Meghna’s ex tries to woo her back. He apologises to her for being the jerk that he is.

It all gets messier when the dulhan begins to have second thoughts about exchanging nuptial vows. About halfway through the film, three possibilities open up: Meghna could return to Gaurav, Dev could finally profess his love to Alina or Dev and Meghna (whose affair does does not get into full swing until the film is ready to wind down) could decide to let their love achieve fruition.

Dono is a story of rich kids groomed to be respectful to their elders. Even in seeking freedom for themselves, they aren’t a defiant lot. The film allows them a drink or two, a tentative kiss and some degree of fun but they aren’t the types to stray from the narrow alleyways of their sanskari upbringing. Their families call the shots.

Rajveer Deol and Paloma Dhillon aren’t short of enthusiasm, but the two young actors have some way to go before they can be regarded as finished articles. They do show flashes that suggest that they are on the way. Individually and in stray scenes, they do exude youthful charm. But there isn’t much chemistry between the two.

Dono has a large cast of actors who crowd the frames without jumping out at us. That allows Deol and Dhillon to hog the limelight although they, too, have to jostle for space in a film that is too long and too dull for anybody to sit up and take notice.

Some of the etchings that Dono does may be new. The canvas isn’t. It is a cinematic heirloom that Avnish Barjatya treats with great caution. No wonder Dono, no matter how assertive the young people it is about are, plays out along expected lines. It offers nothing that could be construed as a clean break from the past.

It is way too antiseptic to be the modern film that it wants to be. In what is purported to be a love story with multiple layers, forget the layers, even the story goes missing. It is a trudge through miles of inanity that labours to persuade us that this is what present-day relationships are – or at least, should be.

It may be true that all the world loves a lover but the two in Dono are destined to be exceptions because they are in a film that knows not where it is going.