Who you feel worst for is actually the lame lead pair—looking so frosty/frozen, throughout. That’s young Khushi Kapoor and Ibrahim Ali Khan. Their lineage is well-known—Sridevi’s daughter, Saif Ali Khan’s son.
Nadaaniyan movie still
Film: Nadaaniyan
On: Netflix
Director: Shauna Gautam
Actors: Ibrahim Ali Khan, Khushi Kapoor
Rating: 1/5
At some point, sitting through this intense insult to sub-human intelligence, I started to wonder, almost loudly, if this movie, produced by Karan Johar, was initially meant for a theatrical release.
But, upon terrible completion, got chipkaoed/pasted on an OTT platform.
Or, is it actually a Netflix Original? Having been through basic quality checks that must start from even the semblance of a thought/script/anything?
The point I felt so is actually the scene inside a school debating club, where the hero is jamming with his opponent, vying for the president’s post.
He checks with other members, if they would prefer a rando, like his opponent, who’s distributed iPhones as bribe. Or him, as he pulls up his sweatshirt to reveal his washboard abs (that surely helps with debating skills).
The intense infantilizing of teenagers that follows makes even Instagram thirst-trap posts a thing of immense profundity.
Apparently, there’s an international debating championship that, if you win, straight-off, gets you a spot in an American Ivy League university. The hero would prefer a swimming scholarship to the top India law school.
Honestly, never met such dumb GenZ blokes in my life—not even characters, similarly at a high-end Delhi school, from the Netflix series Class (2023).
The other thought going through my mind is how the movie screen is such a reflection of age.
That is, once you watch the older actors onboard this pic. One of whom, playing the oldish father, Jugal Hansraj, was once the cutest child-actor onscreen, ever (in Masoom)—we’ve literally watched him grow up/old at the cinemas, no?
Or the other parents in this picture, who were hero-heroines once—Mahima Chaudhry (Pardes), Dia Mirza (Rehnaa Hai Tere Dil Mein), Suniel Shetty (Balwaan)…
That the latter has probably delivered the best performance from the lot tells you all you wanna know about the rest of the show!
There’s some throwback to the ’90s going on as well—what with the return of Ms Braganza from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Archana Puran Singh; lovely, as always), or the line ‘Aur paas, aur paas’ from Dil To Pagal Hai (1997).
All of which, in Nadaaniyan, add up to nada, really—while you’re left to figure what this movie is exactly about. It’s a romance, apparently; that keeps you searching for a conflict.
What could that be, given the heroine, who first hired the lead-guy to pose as her boyfriend, are in love, all along.
The girl’s rather rich. The boy isn’t so much. He gets badly heckled for it, from the biggest morons you’ve watched get admission into a fancy Delhi school.
The people you feel bad for are residents of Noida, more specifically, Greater Noida, disparagingly pronounced ‘New-odda’.
Which is where the hero lives, with his parents. It’s perceived and constantly put down as such a down-market area, that I’m pretty sure the writers of this movie (if any) have never visited Noida.
If not, then at least they would’ve watched the ‘Randhawa Mansion’ in Karan Johar’s own Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023). That’s Greater Noida!
Who you feel worst for is actually the lame lead pair—looking so frosty/frozen, throughout. That’s young Khushi Kapoor and Ibrahim Ali Khan. Their lineage is well-known—Sridevi’s daughter, Saif Ali Khan’s son.
The former made her debut, also on Netflix, with Zoya Akhtar’s The Archies (2023), that had so much going on to singularly call attention to her. The boy, on the other hand, is making his film debut with this abomination, with cameras capturing his face from all angles.
He gets thrown into the dance-floor, every once in a while, to show off his kinetic moves, but is mostly misdirected and thrown under the bus, to seem clueless in every scene, blabbering rubbish. Forget chemistry, it’s hard to define their geography, history…
God knows, audiences love a young romance. It’s usually missing from their lives. They seek it in their movies—you can tell from so many of them, returning to theatres, to watch rereleases like Laila Majnu (2018), Sanam Teri Kasam (2016), while those films are already on OTT.
A picture like Nadaaniyan equals the worst of lazy Bollywood at the moment—imagining and second-guessing some demographic, with zero roots in reality.
That’s not to say there’s nothing good about this film. There is no such film!
I particularly enjoyed the end-credits, with pictures of the main crew that worked on the movie. It’s a nice touch. Doubt you’ll be able to wait that long for it, though.
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