The sorely underappreciated 2014 rom-com Hasee Toh Phasee, a collaboration between two diametrically opposed production houses (the larger-than-life Dharma Productions and the doom-and-gloom Phantom Films), introduced us to then new filmmaker, Vinil Mathew. He seemed very promising. Hasee Toh Phasee was an unapologetically fresh take on the thoroughly worn out masala genre as it dexterously fused elements of traditional, feel-good Hindi cinema and Anurag Kashap & Co’s macabre oeuvre. At that time, seeing a heroine in a masala film who was a junkie and didn’t have a stitch of make-up on was unheard of. Maybe that’s why the film wasn’t a box office hit. It was just too left-field, too ahead of its time for the masses.
Sadly, Haseen Dilruba does not hold a candle to Hasee Toh Phasee. Hell, it doesn’t even hold a candle to a latter day Govinda picture. Am I painting a clear enough picture here? The movie is shit.
Mathew attempts to reinvent another genre here, just as he did with Hasee, but he misses his mark completely this time round. Haseen Dilruba is a poorly written love letter to North Indian pulp fiction that extracts all of the sweeping, epic romances and OTT pedestrian melodrama that makes trashy novels the treasured relics of postmodernism that they are.
Mathew fails to understand that without those key elements, his film is lost, which it unquestionably is.
What a waste of good Vikrant Massey.
