Ek Din movie review: If good intentions were to be the bedrock of all good love-stories, Ek Din would have scaled the peak. Movie romances are designed to make us moon and sigh, because they give us a pair of lovers who will wither and die if they do not end up together.
Just on that single metric, Ek Din, a remake of Thai film One Day, struggles to score, because neither Dino (Junaid Khan) nor Meera (Sai Pallavi) look as if they will perish if they part: it’s more like they will find a prosaic proverb for it, and go their separate ways.
Dinesh Kumar Srivastava aka Dino (Junaid Khan) has a solo superpower. He is the self-confessed ultimate invisible man, beavering away at the IT department at a faceless Noida corporation. It’s the kind of company where the boss (Kunal Kapoor, in an extended cameo) is busy two-timing his wife, while getting it on with a pretty co-worker, carrying on the dalliance when he carts his excited staff to an offsite in picture-perfect Japan.
Japan? Yes, indeedy, that very faraway country, decided upon just because Meera loves all things Japanese and knows all kinds of dinky details about it, working off a wish-list which has tourist-friendly snow festivals and cute Snow Miku dolls, making for a change from the frowny Labubu ones.
So far, so all right. The Hokkaido setting means fresh scenery, whose snowy slopes have our gang skiing and falling and laughing, but turning treacherous when a heartbroken Meera is found half frozen, and diagnosed with the kind of short-haul amnesia dearly beloved by our movies.
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Except her memory will be disrupted only by a single day, proclaims a Gujarati doctor in a Hokkaido hospital: oh we Gujaratis are everywhere when Meera looks bemused. On that ‘ek din’ the timid, self-effacing Dino, who has secretly yearned for the perky Meera from afar, finds himself up close and personal with the girl of his dreams, and as they walk and talk and chow down on Japanese cuisine — ’gonads’ of marine creatures, she with relish, he with reluctance; nope, I’m not making this up — they are drawn to each other.
A couple of problems prove insurmountable. First off, Meera is talked up as this unattainable goddess, both for the boss as well as the likeable nerd employee, but nothing about her is suggestive of anything more than the nice girl next door in the way Sai Pallavi is styled here.
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The second, connected with the first, is that there’s zero spark between Dino and Meera, even when they try very hard: except for a sweet sequence when they awkwardly flirt while stranded in a snow-storm, they remain two neat individuals trying to make the best of an unexpected situation.
Sai Pallavi is a wonderful actor, capable of pulling off characters with complexity. In her Hindi debut, the hope must have been that she would pull Junaid up to her standards, but that is futile: he stays firmly in his lane, punctilious at best. And that’s not my word; that’s a descriptive that the script comes up for his character.
Ek Din isn’t actively terrible. It tries to bring back clean youthful romance back to Bollywood, currently trapped between excessively violent and misogynist planks. It’s even got a forgettable Arijit song. But, just like its leads, it has no zing.
Ek Din movie cast: Sai Pallavi, Junaid Khan, Kunal Kapoor, Kavin Dave, Pragati Mishra
Ek Din movie director: Sunil Panday
Ek Din movie rating: 2 stars
