Ek Din Review:
Credit where it’s due. At a time when the Bollywood movie-goer can only choose between a macho-misogynistic actioner or a propaganda-piece posing as a truth- exposé, Ek Din comes as a sweet respite. It’s warm, fuzzy and feels like sipping on a marshmallow-dipped hot chocolate after you have had enough of that tongue-reddening spice. But the taste doesn’t stay consistent, it oscillates between bland and saccharine. The film gets messy, clumsy and once the love-story gap is filled it starts to overstay its welcome.
Cast: Junaid Khan, Sai Pallavi and Kunal Kapoor
Directed by: Sunil Pandey
Written by: Sneha Desai and Spandan Desai
Rating: 2.5 stars
Boy meets girl, boy seeks girl. When both Hindi films and the world are being inundated with men high on main character energy, Ek Din brings back the spectacle-donning awkward protagonist who sees and admires a girl from a distance. It can be cute or creepy depending upon the film genre. The generically-named Dinesh Kumar Srivastava aka Dino (Junaid Khan) is an IT-service engineer at a software company in Noida. He is a wallflower personality and the highlight of his day is seeing and daydreaming about the elusive Meera (Sai Pallavi). She, on the other hand, is seeing the company’s head Nakul (Kunal Kapoor), a married man who constantly assures her that the divorce papers are on their way. At a company retreat in Japan, Dino stands in front of a fortune bell and wishes to be with Meera even just for a day. His wish comes true, however, it’s not magical, but medical.
After being spurned by her boss/ boyfriend, a drunk and heartbroken Meera suffers an accident which afflicts her with Transient Global Amnesia (TGA), a short-term memory loss (Ghajini actor Aamir Khan serves as producer) which deletes the last two years of her life. The condition, however, lasts for just a day which she spends with Dino, who poses as her boyfriend. The catch is that once she gets her memories back, she will remember everything except the day she spent with him.
Ek Din is well-intentioned and its premise piques interest (the film is a remake of the 2016 Thai film One Day) but the narrative seems convoluted and convenient. I would have preferred a simple story of an under-confident boy who takes charge and brightens the day of a devastated girl, discovering love and himself in the mix. What we get is a protagonist who is a meek-geek, spewing up facts like he is ChatGPT but never really standing up for anything. Events happen for and around Dino while he stays the same, his character arc like a dead-straight line on an ECG machine. Junaid also plays him stiff and straight with no surprises.
The film’s cozy charm dries off soon as plot holes pile up. At times it felt like a Japan tourism promotional with trivia on the country’s being given as tidbits even when they are not serving the story. Sai Pallavi, however, is magnetic. She plays the Japanophile Meera with such charming abandon, it’s infectious. The camera can’t get enough of her and she is incessantly watchable whenever she comes up on screen. Her performance also eclipses the film’s flaws. This is Sai’s Hindi debut and infuses promise in her upcoming act as Sita in Ramayana.
Like most Hindi films, Ek Din starts off decently but then starts losing confidence in its own storytelling devices. It drags, gets predictable, gets generic and desperately starts trying to find a suitable ending which can’t come soon enough. The film seemed like a soothing ointment for all the violence and aggression that has been blaring out of the big screens recently. Even if it is not new, it felt nostalgic. It has a softness and like the critic Roger Ebert said: “films are empathy machines”, Ek Din tries to be one. It’s just that more than one cog is loose.