Starring: Uday Chopra, Priyanka Chopra
Rating: Ouch
In Pyaar Impossible, we have the age old nerd and hot chick story, featuring Priyanka Chopka (who must not sleep for all the work she’s been accruing in the past few years), sap Uday Chopra, and winsome child actor Advika Yadav.
The movie opens inauspiciously, with a voiceover explaining how Abhay (Chopra) has no self esteem and keeps busy doing everyone’s homework (I ask you, where outside of the movies are teens so confident in their loserhood that they assert themselves as the Homework Doer?), and has a really big boner for the prettiest girl on campus, Alisha.
Painful Problems #1 and 2: This cues the first song, titled “Alisha”. I don’t know that Bollywood is the best place for this young man to blossom, because while an intelligent actor, he seems very timid about opening his mouth. I’m not referencing his line readings, I’m saying that for all of the big musical numbers he’s supposed to be dancing and belting, his mouth opens about a fingers-width, like a bloated frog trying to croak in the sun. It’s painfully bad lip-synching, something that I almost take for granted in Hindi actors.
The second painful problem is this song is just atrocious – most of them are. Overly watered down of all the beautiful elements that make Hindustani music so unique, it’s a synth happy, reject from a boy band song about the stooopid name Alisha. Have name songs ever really worked? I mean, aside from “Come On, Eileen” which was pure genius. The answer is no. Hell to the no.
Moving on, one night our hero is semi-creepily stalking his love as she is out drinking with her friends. In another drunken antic that only happens in the movies, Princess decides to walk the rail of a bridge over a little river, in her heels, like dumb rich bitches do, and falls into the water (amidst the revelation from a groupie “Alisha can’t swim!”, also like you do). Hanging their heads over the rail to watch their friend drown in a vague, disconnected horror, I was actually ready for the dark tones of the movie to bubble up and make some real neo-Gothic statements about how apathetic we are towards human lives… when the Sad Sap (as I have now dubbed him) predictably ruined my musings by saving his lady love. She never gets a look at his face and is carted off from college the next day, leaving Sap looking… well, you know, the usual – sad, dejected, lifeless.
So sad, dejected, and lifeless, he sleeps through the next seven years of his life. I think.
Sap now lives with his equally sap-like dad. Starting off a lovely morning ritual is the dance-like movements of father and son preparing their breakfast in tandem, a moment that had understated humor and style, but was effectively crushed as soon as the painful dialogue started. Worst offender was Dad’s segue from Abhay’s big meeting to try and sell his software he’s invented (like nerds do when they grow up), to mid-sentence asking about “that girl you’ve been in love with for seven years”. And really, that sentence you just read had a better transition than the dad did. Okay. We get it. Sap’s life has not moved on since AHH-LEE-SHA.
Meeting with moustache-twirler, er, computer executive. I’m sorry, isn’t India in the middle of a giant technology boom? Who exactly are they talking down to, when they generalize and talk about a UNIVERSAL PLATFORM THAT WILL RUN ALL APPLE/PC/LINUX/WHATEVS programs at the same time, from the same system (and BTdubs, he also has it available for smartphones, yanno, if anyone’s interested) as though he’s created a slightly less mind numbing version of Excel? The person that makes that hot piece of science fiction programming for realsies is going to be billionaire, for eff’s sake. Throw me a frickin bone.
Oh right, the plot. Sorry. Moustache-twirler jacks the software while our Sap is in the bathroom, and no one in town will talk to him as he’s now peddling software with a “bad rep” since two people are claiming it. Determined to search down the bastard, he follows rumor mill to Malaysia, where the guy has taken the hottest software commodity to sell (like you..do?).
AND OH MY JESUS, what a crazy random happenstance, the company Sap has come to storm into has a beautiful woman working as their PR Manager, and she looks kind of familiar... here comes the breeze and slow mo shot as she turns to face the camera...
AAAHH-LEEE-SHAA LA LA LA LA (Oh god, remix almost worse than the full length original!)
Sap chickens out from confronting the company in light of this new discovery. Probably a good idea, as he would have had to hold that little notebook very strategically the whole time. Awwwkward.
Alisha is now a single divorcee mom with a terror for a 6 year old daughter (read upper-middle class daughter of a suburban family from America, you get the gist). Her babysitter quits, Sap appears just as AAAHH-LEEE-SHAAA is anxiously waiting for the babysitter replacement, and WHOA CRAZY, somehow Sap gets mistaken for a manny and lands a new job.
And this is the point that a six year old grabs hold of this movie and yanks it quite assertively from being The Most Awful Thing Ever. She is spirited, adorably sadistic, and charming. Sap is made into mincemeat, but comes back for more, which really scores points with AAAHH-LEEEE-SHAAA.
Sap starts off his manny job doing what every manny wishes they had the disposable income to do – he hires a team of twelve tiny Malaysian maids to do all his chores during the day, and then showers his terrible charge with the gift of Rock Band to win her over (like you do).
House sparkles, little girl tamed. Geez, housewives make that shit look so hard.
Moustache twirler meets with Alisha’s company about eighteen times trying to close the deal on the stolen software sale, and Alisha comes home and has homey girl talk time with Sap over coffee in her kitchen every night, an exercise that mostly just confirms that this women is painfully self-obsessed, and Sap is painfully without a thought for himself, which actually... makes them... kinda perfect! Aww! Warm fuzzies!
In a matchmaking effort by the 6 year old sprite, Princess and the Sap spend an evening out, where on a bet to prove that appearances don’t matter, Alisha lets Sap dress her up in baggy clothes, messy hair, and his spare pair of thick nerd glasses. She runs around the bar trying to get men to pay attention to to her, and when no one does... she is crushed.
No, really crushed. So much that you almost want to reach out to her and tell her asking a man something about himself will get her much farther than a curling iron, but the pity doesn’t last for long, because she tearfully tells Sap at the end of the night that “I’m just really upset... I’m glad you were here for me.”
WHAT?!? Wearing your baggy clothes and not having to beat men off with a stick for a night was that hard? She plays it with all of the vulnerability of a woman revealing that she only has one boob, or was beaten as a child, or about four thousand other really relevant reasons to be sad.
At this point the story irritated me so much I cannot bear to sum the rest of it up, save a brief pause at the best song in the film. In an adorable school play setting, after AAALEEEESHAA has cast Sap out at the bidding of moustache twirler (who wants to get in her pants) with the claim that SAP is trying to steal HIS software, Alisha sits alone and watches her daughter re-enact the beginnings of this nerd/princess love story. The song and little actress is so charming, you kind of just want things to end right there.
But, they don’t. Long, drawn out, public confession from Alisha to Sap as she realizes he has always been there for her, and they luuuurve each other, and rush in to stop mustache twirler just in time to claim the super pimp program and embrace.
Pyaar Impossible – with the faint glimmer of chemistry weighted down by awful, awful writing, it surely is impossible. But sign me up for the next flick Advika Yadav is in, that kid is adorbs.
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