The latest Hindi film Ek Din, starring Aamir Khan’s son Junaid Khan and Sai Pallavi, is the remake of the Thai film One Day. The central idea of this movie revolves around a medical condition called transient global amnesia, where the patient loses recent memories for approximately 24 hours. However, this movie, directed by Sunil Pandey, is a terribly written film that just goes after the worn-out cliches in the cinematic language. With Junaid’s nerd act just falling flat, the decision to give this one a theatrical release rather than opting for a safe Netflix-dumping feels too delusional from Aamir Khan, the co-producer of the movie, and Junaid. If you are someone who has managed to find depth in Call Me Bae, this cheesy romantic story is definitely for you.
Dinesh Srivastava, aka Dino, works in a corporate company in Gurgaon, and he is someone whom nobody notices. He has a huge crush on this South Indian co-worker, Meera Ranganathan, who was actually in a romantic relationship with her boss. What we see in this movie are the events that unfold in these two’s lives when Meera experienced TGA during an office trip to Japan, and circumstances led to a scenario where Dino could live the life of her boyfriend for that one day. (Not a spoiler! All these are there in the trailer)
Placing Transient Global Amnesia in a love story on paper seems like a great opportunity to depict unrequited love. But this movie seems to be something even the writers weren’t excited about. Almost from that opening shot that tries to show the hero as somebody who merges with the wall, they are trying to emulate that outdated sitcom kind of energy. And this excessive voice-over from the hero, filled with adjectives of rejection, can immediately make you disconnect with the movie. The nerdy jokes are so bad that even the K3G version of Karan Johar might not approve them. Almost every twist in the tale is visible from a mile away. And looking at the way the central character behaves towards the end, you feel like shouting at him for his stupid behavior rather than feeling bad for his insecurities.
Asking us to imagine Junaid Khan, a tall, white dude in an Indian corporate office, as a nobody who won’t be noticed by anyone is a bit too much. In the first twenty minutes of the story itself, we get an idea about the premise, and even without seeing the trailer, one can assume how the movie will move forward. The problem is with the writing. I am someone who believes that if Karan Johar decides to make K3G today with the same script, it won’t work, and Ek Din makers seem to have a different opinion about that. The tone of the drama, sentiments, and dialogues of Ek Din lack emotional maturity. For some reason, I feel the writers of this movie are underestimating the teenagers of today. You don’t need to emphasize the Ek Din aspect of the story multiple times to make the audience appreciate your metaphor brilliance.
Directed by Sunil Pandey, the lighting of this movie is extremely flat, and it hardly manages to make us feel for this nerdy, less-understood hero either through visuals or dialogue. The character is designed as someone who begs for sympathy. This sympathy-craving nature is so obvious that when he enters a grey space in the second half, you will feel a sense of resentment towards him rather than understanding what may have made him take that impulsive decision. Towards the end, the movie wants to show the hero as someone who secretly suffers, but when you see what he eventually does to win his love, you will feel like questioning all those seemingly selfless things he did before that. Among the songs that are mostly sung by Arijit Singh, the title track really stays with you because of the way it is placed. CGI has been extensively used in many snow sequences. Even the placement of certain key elements through CGI was easily identifiable due to its mediocre quality.
The most evident letdown of the movie is the performance of Junaid Khan. One can easily feel that he is playing that character rather than being that character. Be it the nerdy part or the areas where his eyes are filled with tears, he simply cannot evoke an emotion in us, and as I already mentioned, the written script is not helping any actor in the movie to enhance their performance. Sai Pallavi, with her natural charm, manages to make some of the intimate moments between the lead pair somewhat engaging. I think the constant criticism about the bad representation of the South Indian languages is making Bollywood take that aspect seriously. The little bit of spoken Tamil in this film is very naturalistic. However, these are baby steps, as one could see Sai Pallavi’s character having a Hindi vocabulary that isn’t really of a South Indian who has been to Gurgaon for just two years. Kunal Kapoor as Nakul is credited with a guest appearance, and that was pretty much his duration in the whole film.
Ek Din is one more to the list of Hindi movies that show how disconnected their writers are from the audience. It is a movie that tries to apply a formula at every point rather than thinking about how it can depict something freshly, breaking the patterns and predictions. The overall creative laziness of this terrible tourism ad for Japan is so evident that you might wish you were watching this movie with transient global amnesia and would wake up the next day forgetting about the movie.
