LoveYatri movie review: Aayush Sharma’s film makes you hate nepotism as much as Kangana Ranaut

LoveYatri
Director - Abhiraj Minawala
Cast - Aayush Sharma, Warina Hussain
Rating - 0/5

In the second half of LoveYatri, when you have already watched over 100 torturous minutes of this bland and lazy film, its hero Aayush Sharma has an epiphany. “Ye sab galat hai,” he tells the leading lady Warina Hussain and quickly lists everything that has happened in the film till then. For that brief moment, he is a stand-in for all of us – the audience.

The moment passes and the rest is a trudge so vacuous and asinine that calling it “mindless entertainment”, a genre that Bollywood treasures so lovingly, would be a disservice to it. Aayush plays Susu, obviously the film’s director and scriptwriter must have thought that calling him Susu would be such a hoot. Unfortunately for them, LoveYatri’s audience is not comprised only of kindergartners.

Watch the LoveYatri trailer here 

Other than his name, the one thing that sets apart Susu is his lack of ambition, a quality he shares with this film. His aim is to become a garba teacher and, after a pep talk by his uncle, to fall in love. It takes him exactly 30 seconds—and levitation—to do the latter when he sees the pretty NRI heroine, Manisha who is called Michelle when in London. His wingmen, aptly named Rocket and Negative, and his uncle – a badly hamming Ram Kapoor – hatch a rather idiotic plan to push the romance along. Over a number of dandiya numbers, which are hard to tell apart, the two fall in love only for Warina’s NRI daddy, played by Ronit Roy, to jump in with a role so clichéd that calling him a “typical Indian father” suffices in most scenes.

The trope of rich girl-poor boy in Hindi films is as old as Hindi films themselves; the haughty parents have made an appearance in more films than we can count. A story about young love is also the favourite launchpad for fresh talent. Instead of trying something new, the Loveyatri team of debutants – Aayush Sharma, Warina Hussain and director Abhiraj Minawala – takes recourse in the familiar. Everything you see in LoveYatri, you have seen before. In a well made film, it could give you comfort, in LoveYatri it gives you headache.

The one-dimensional screenplay is well supported by cringe-worthy dialogues to make this 160-minute film a war on your senses. Here’s a sample: “Love is like a SIM card. Whether the phone is expensive or cheap, the SIM remains the same”. There is another impassioned speech by Aayush where he claims garba is the inspiration of all dance forms known to mankind; no surprise that his father – the recipient of this address – had a glassy-eyed look on his face.

From Vadodara, Gujarat, the film moves to London without any change in tone or tempo. We see more garba, we see even less sense. Worried about competition from Warina’s British boyfriend, Aayush is ready to give up when he gets another pep talk from Ram, this time in a British pub full of football fans. He gives Aayush examples of these timeless lovers – Salman Khan in Tere Naam, Aamir Khan in Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak and Shah Rukh Khan in Veer Zara. Our loverboy understands what is at stake and goes back to woo his woman.

Throughout this ebb and flow of his love story, Aayush has the same surprised expression on his face -- like he cannot believe that Salman Khan decided to bankroll the film -- and Warina matches him expression-for-expression. At the end of Loveyatri, you hate nepotism as much as Kangana Ranaut. Loveyatri is a 140-minute long reason why it needs to be rooted out from the film industry.

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