Kahan Shuru Kahan Khatam Exists Because It Has To

SAURABH DASGUPTA's Kahan Shuru Kahan Khatam, a wistful name for a Hindi rom-com, can be accurately surmised as four music videos rolled into one. Here are the premises: A runaway bride meets a wedding crasher and they spend a night dodging bullets from her gangster family. The said runaway bride meets the family of the said wedding crasher, they pretend to be a married couple and use that as an excuse to dance at Holi. The said runaway bride decides to go back home to save the man she barely knows and gets kidnapped in the process. And finally, they meet against all odds cutting to a cutesy dance.

All of these would have counted as spoilers if Kahan Shuru Kahan Khatam’s story (written by Laxman Utekar of Mimi and Zara Hatke Zara Bachke fame, and Rishi Virmani) had behaved as one. One could dismiss the screenplay as incompetent but there is something willfully absurd about it, like the narrative has made peace with its mediocrity and even used it as a shield. The proposition is also touching. You see, it’s relatively easy to critique a film that fails despite ambition. But when a film crawls because it wants to, one has to just sit back and wait till the crawling is over.

At 106 minutes, Dasgupta’s directorial debut has an unpunished runtime which makes sense because most of it is dedicated to portraying songs. This also makes sense given that Kahan Shuru Kahan Khatam is an obvious launch vehicle for Dhvani Bhanushali, the singer segueing into acting with this. What doesn't make sense is turning it into a full-length film, when nothing in Kahan Shuru Kahan Khatam—with its repeated scenes of chest-thumping feminism—is too far-fetched or complicated for a music video. There is another hiccup. How do you make sense of the fact that an outing which only aligns with #OnlyGirlsLivesMatter has a female protagonist whose entire screen time is dedicated to sleeping or running away? Of course, it is done to camouflage Bhanushali’s acting capabilities but like many things, it does not add up.

Krishna (Aashim Gulati) is a professional wedding crasher. Born in a pandit family, he spent his childhood doing puja with his father (Rakesh Bedi) and watching weddings from afar. So, when he grew up, he did what any self-respecting upper-caste, deprived man would do: he crashed weddings. As luck would have it, he barges into Meera’s wedding where there are more bullets than flowers in the air. Like any self-respecting strong, independent woman in Hindi films, Meera (Bhanushali) is introduced to smoking on the roof. Her brows are couched with annoyance. It is her wedding day but her father (Rajesh Sharma) did not ask if she wanted to get married. She would have said yes had he asked, she says. It is all very juvenile, a very fourth-standard feminism lesson from here. Characters take turns to take the centrestage and assert the importance of respecting women. They are all self-aware, self-righteous and only a breath shy from breaking the fourth wall and directly addressing us.

Kahan Shuru Kahan Khatam knows what film it wants to be and the self-consciousness flattens everything. The messaging is beaten to a pulp till it hits you like words. Even Gulati, an uneven but exciting actor, is rendered unwatchable here. He plays the different beats of Krishna like he is portraying multiple characters. There is a dullness to his turn, much like Kahan Shuru Kahan Khatam which exists because it has to. You cannot fight that.