Wrongly promoted with a confused presentation, JALEBI turns out to be a weepy mess that fails to find the most important emotional connect with the viewer and remains completely predictable throughout with an all familiar story progression.
Explaining the confused promotion, firstly it was introduced with a bold poster of a girl leaning out of the train kissing her boyfriend, whereas the film doesn’t have any such feel of a young love story at all. Secondly its trailer pointed towards a mature romantic saga depicted during an exciting train journey, but a mature outlook remains far away from the film, its writing and its young performers.
An official adaptation of the hit Bengali film PRAKTAN (2016), this is actually a quite different film in comparison, both in terms of outlook, execution as well as performances. Giving you a fair idea where the original featured two veteran actors Prosenjit Chatterjee and Rituparna Sengupta, JALEBI features two young actors Rhea Chakraborty and Varun Mitra playing the same roles (indicating the huge difference). Here though Rhea tries her best portraying the lonely girl, her performance never reaches out to the viewer, since the direction itself remains utterly confused right from the very first sequence which simply puts you off declaring a different film than projected in its youthful promotion.
Directed by debutant Pushpdeep Bhardwaj, the basic fault remains in the amateurish attempt to woo both the young and the mature audiences together with such a subject. With not much of novelty in its basic premise of a divorced couple meeting again after years in a train journey, the film actually doesn’t work in its uneven story progression going back into flashbacks at regular intervals. Besides the girl’s character looks completely mismatched and confused in both the present and past sequences like two different girls.
Yet again using the ‘boringly repetitive’ backdrop of Delhi’s Chandni Chowk, JALEBI also doesn’t connect as one misses the expected chemistry between the lead couple and the screenplay hasn't got any fresh, impressive sequences representing their deep bonding. Moreover all half-baked characters as friends, family members and fellow passengers in the train journey also become a big drawback along with an ineffective writing (dialogues) and an odd ending.
But above all, lackluster music in a Bhatt camp movie simply conveys the ideas getting short and the vision getting lost in the recent times. In short, this JALEBI is not the one that should be tasted, made without the essential ingredients. However, on a personal note, I do feel sorry for the hardworking Rhea Chakraborty, who is really waiting for long but the tables are not turning for her even after getting the lead roles. In fact that reminds me of an old saying that luck plays a much important role in the show business, even more than the talent and looks.
Rating : 1.5 / 5
(Note : At the time of writing this review, JALEBI had just released on Amazon Prime and the original Bengali film PRAKTAN (2016) was available as an unofficial upload at Youtube with English Subtitles.)
