Ishkq (Preity Zinta) is a half-French, half-Indian girl who is a complete commitment-phobe. On a train to Paris one day, she bumps into Akash (Rhehan Malliek), who feels the same way about relationships. The two strike up a conversation and decide to spend one night partying together in Paris, with the promise that they won’t see each other after that night.
Will cupid strike? More importantly, will the audience accept Preity Zinta’s new venture? Here’s what we think!
On the surface, it’s a pretty film. Paris has been shot very well and the city looks gorgeous. Preity, too, has a way of lighting up the screen in certain moments, although in others she looks like she’s trying desperately hard to remind us of why we fell in love with her in the first place – so much so that she tends to overdo it and appear plastic-y.
Unfortunately, the film has little going for it. The story is absolutely wafer-thin, and the first half of the movie ambles along with nothing happening. The two meet a strange guy (Chunky Pandey, who else?) who sells them a die that they can roll in order to decide what to do next. That should’ve been a red flag for the makers right there, because you know it’s a bad sign when the most interesting thing that happens in the first half of your film is a Chunky Pandey cameo. Extremely conveniently, the die rolls everything in order, so they party, eat dinner, make a “movie” (these sequences in particular are so pointless, it hurts), drink coffee, etc etc etc. And then they part ways, never to see each other again.
Except they do. Just a few scenes later, Akash is on his way back to Paris and he very easily manages to track Ishkq down, despite the fact that they hadn’t exchanged contact details and had decided not to see each other again. Hence we start the process once more, this time with the two at least admitting that they have feelings for each other.
The problem is that there’s very little development of the characters or their story. Their adversity to commitment is explained away in a few sentences, they fall in love in the span of a song, they declare their hatred for each other almost immediately after said love song, and then they manage to get over it all very easily. The post-interval portion also features a desperate attempt to catch some eyeballs by including a Salman Khan item number, and again – you know it’s a bad sign when the most interesting thing that happens in the second half of your film is Salman dancing extremely disinterestedly, even by his own standards. What we get in the end is a very dull movie, where you can’t bring yourself to care about either the characters or their story, just because you can’t connect with them.
But, on the bright side – it’s a short film.
Verdict:
Skip, unless you’re a diehard Preity Zinta fan and want to see her back on the big screen.