G-d knows I wanted to like this movie. For starters, it’s got Fahadh Faasil in it, whose been one of my favorite Indian actors the past couple years. It’s also India’s first pandemic-made film which upped its ante even more for me.
Much to my chagrin, Amazon Prime’s C U Soon is an altogether reductive and anticlimactic experience.
Jimmy (played winningly by Roshan Mathew) is a hopeless romantic living in Dubai who falls for a mysterious girl on WhatsApp. Jimmy soon proposes to her and tells his family about it. His mother is concerned about the sudden proposal so she enlists the help of his intelligence services brother (Fahadh Faasil) to obtain information on the mysterious girl. His findings aren’t at all what anyone would’ve expected.
C U Soon has the machinations of a good thriller what with its twists and turns and a uniformly superb ensemble cast, but it’s the film’s denouement that its undoing. The tone shifts jarringly from that of a terse thriller to a schmaltzy social commentary, more specifically a cautionary tale about the parallels between immigration for unskilled third world women and human trafficking.
And if that’s not incoherent enough, the film takes another totally WTF turn towards the end – one of the characters makes a mad dash to the airport to stop the One from getting away! That’s right, the most reviled American rom-com cliche to ever exist has been neatly placed at the end of a Malayalam thriller. I mean honestly, the fuck were they thinking?
The film has other problems such as muddled character motivations and implausible conversations between a misogynistic character and his dominant, but also weirdly subservient at times, female colleague, but I digress. The film is as dumb as its title. The fact that it received glowing reviews from a litany of Indian film critics frankly shocked me.
Maybe it has to do with it being a Malayalam film; Malayalam films tend to be treated a bit more leniently because the Mollywood film industry is the underdog; the supposed David to the Goliaths that are Kollywood and Bollywood.
There’s also an uncontested blanket perception amongst Indian liberals that Malayalam films are inherently better than Hindi films, which is simply false. Had C U Soon been a Hindi film, it wouldn’t have been spared.
And I don’t give a fig about it being shot entirely on phones and computer screens. This might be a new, shiny gimmick to some but many are already acquainted with the computer screen film sub-genre whether it was through the far superior 2018 thriller Searching or, if you’re a weirdo like me, the nonsensical avant-garde film, The Wrong Ferrari (Dev Hynes, Devendra Banhart, Sky Ferreira and other indie rokkers), which was the first ever film to be shot on an iPhone.
That movie came out in 2010!
