Cocktail

A smart romcom with three beautiful people gets all confused once it drags Indian values in

Cocktail is a breezy movie about three empty-headed magpies in London—one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl—and by the time you’re done with them, you are no wiser about what makes them tick or what they want of each other. It might have been a good idea if the characters existed in some sort of social or professional context, bh

but then you can’t expect that of magpies.

Which is really surprising because director Homi Adajania’s last film, Being Cyrus —in which three of the cast of Cocktail acted so well (Boman, Dimple and Saif)—was all about context, albeit a niche one of Parsi eccentricity. Here, three floaters start living together in the well-appointed pad of party girl Veronica (Deepika Padukone). She invites the lovely Delhi waif, Meera (Diana Penty), in, and shorty after, gets into a casual relationship with Gautam (Saif Ali Khan), a serial flirt with nothing on his agenda except fobbing off his mother (Dimple Kapadia) and the marriage proposals she brings him. He parks himself in, too, and Veronica, Meera and Gautam are soon fast friends.

As long as commitment is absent from the triangular relationship, it works well. But then Mummyji and Mamaji (Boman Irani) turn up and find the shy, conservative ‘Indian’ personality of Meera suitable for matrimonial purposes. The trio go along with the hoax, and this is where the movie’s cookie crumbles.

The director allows an alien sensibility in. He succumbs to an irrational fear of modernity and drags in notions of monogamy and, worse, Indian cultural expectations. The persona of naturally shy Meera is suddenly emulated by free-spirited Veronica, and she turns into some sort of fake Sati Savitri—as if to say her vivacious independence was wrong to begin with.

Cocktail is disappointing. It begins as a light-hearted entertainer and ends up as an insincere compromise.

About The Author

Ajit Duara