Movie Review - Half Girlfriend by Suhel Johar

Half Girlfriend  Is Just Another Run Of The Mill Yawn Fest.

Director Mohit Suri's film Half Girlfriend is based on Chetan Bhagat's book with the same title. If Chetan Bhagat’s original book was bad its screen adaptations is no better or maybe just worse. The film defies logic and relies heavily upon its six music directors to make the film convincing

Half Girlfriend has as many as six music directors. The album has around ten tracks that cover a good chunk of the film’s running length of 135 minutes. The generic sad-love Mithoon ballads can’t drown out the shiny, half-witted and aspirational Bollywood-ness of Bhagat’s writing.

 

His ideas of Bihar, small-town dreams, privilege, poverty, class divides, sports, elitism, sex, romance, education, separation, relationship dynamics, dysfunctional families, feminism and domestic violence seem to be ripped out of an eighteen-year-old Miss World contestant’s rehearsed speech waxing lyrical about World Peace and African orphans. His immense fondness of serendipity as a dramatic plot device is almost as obsessive as Ram Gopal Varma’s penchant for blinding audiences through absurd camera angles.

Half Girlfriend is about a Bihari landlord Madhav Jha (Arjun Kapoor), who speaks broken English in an accent that sounds more like it has been developed by a Juhu activist to mock Maharastrian extremists averse to the influx of migrants. He is an ace basketball player at Delhi’s posh St. Steven’s College. He falls for the super-rich Riya Somani (Shraddha Kapoor). They spend a lot of time playing basketball.  

Riya also loves getting drenched in the rain in a variety of skimpy dresses and singing apart from playing the guitar, because I guess she loves Aashiqui 2. She soon agrees to be his “half girlfriend” – a term that can only be the brainchild of the book’s esteemed author.

Coming back to the story Riya has commitment issues because she is a poor little rich girl. Her father beats up her mother every night. So she uses music as an escape. Madhav attends her birthday party at a mansion filled with high-society North Indian snobs who speak like cultured extras on a British zombie movie.

Madhav is provoked by his Bihari roommate and best friend Shailesh (Vikrant Massey) to sleep with her in order to earn full loyalty. Paying heed to his friend’s advice Madhav mistreats Riya, who then decides to leave college to get married to Rohan, a filthy rich NRI guy and her childhood friend.

Most of this happens over one song, or one broken into many parts, or maybe two songs. Time passes. Madhav mourns for three years, graduates, goes back to his village, helps his mother with social work, and bumps into a divorced Riya in Patna while he is there to win funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to incorporate female toilets in his school so that the girl child studies too. He also takes an opportunity to mention the government’s ‘beti bachao beti padhao’ initiative in order to acquire a free chit from the sanskaari Censor Board.

Riya coaches him in English so that he can make a grand speech to Gates. And we see a digitally superimposed image of Gates’ real face into this scene. The result is ridiculous.

Madhav’s mother (Seema Biswas) meanwhile threatens Riya to stay away from her son because – you know what? It doesn’t matter. This is the mother whose trademark line to her son is “haar ko harao”. Defeat defeats?

Finally, the film ends with Madhav and Riya successfully running the school, and now even have a daughter.

The major drawback of the film is its predictable and wafer thin story, which progresses in such a way that it becomes tedious to watch after the first 30 minutes of the film.  The film travels on a very thin story line without any layers for the characters. It tries to bank on some cheesy punch lines by the characters which get annoying as they repeat. Some scenes desperately try to get whistles but fail. Sometimes it gets too naively manipulative. Madhav Jha, who hailing from a small village in Bihar is incapable of speaking proper English. But, such a character is able to enroll himself in St Stephens, one of the elite colleges of Delhi University, known for students having exemplary English speaking skills.  

Half Girlfriend tests your endurance to the full as the narrative unnecessarily brings in twist and turns, even as you eagerly wait for the film to end. I can remember at least one place where I heaved a sigh of relief assuming the movie was finally over, only for it to go on for another half hour. This was the general feeling of the audience watching the morning show. The film is big on brand placement (Close Up, Make My Trip – who could now lose many loyalists).

Director Mohit Suri tries hard to make something significant out of a half-baked script, but fails miserably. By choosing to make a film on a mediocre book like Half Girlfriend is like a self inflicted wound.

Tushar Hiranandani's screenplay while Ishita Moitra's dialogue are ordinary. Cinematography by Vishnu Rao is above average while Deven Murdeshwar's editing is below average.  Amongst the many songs in the film, Main Phir Bhi Tumko Chaahunga, is outstanding.

Performancewise, Arjun Kapoor sleepwalks through his role. His Bihari English is artificial to the core, but he tries his best to be Madhav but falls short of it. Shraddha is lifeless in the film. When playing the Half Girlfriend, she hardly made an impact. Neither her problems evoke empathy, nor does her smile bring a glow. She ended up being a log of wood in this film. Seema Biswas and Vikrant Massey are good. Rhea Chakraborty impresses in her cameo.

On the whole, with so many halves stacked-in Half Girlfriend it would be futile to expect a complete film.