The film is a rom-com about the culture clash between a Punjabi man and a Malayali woman. It might have been better off trying to tell its own story instead of constantly paying homage to older movies. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
Sidharth Malhotra is Param, and he’s trying to make an app that will make him as rich as his father. A developer suggests something that will help people find their soulmate. When Param asks his father for money, the man says he needs proof of concept. How does Param prove that the app works? By testing it on himself, of course. His data is fed into the app, and it’s a perfect match with Sundari (Janhvi Kapoor). She runs a homestay in Kerala. There’s a great romantic premise here for our tech-obsessed times: Can an app do something that’s traditionally the heart’s domain? Can something as intangible as love be defined by crunching numbers on a laptop? Is science going to take over this area, too? Is this film an extension of a new breed of sci-fi Hindi cinema that marries humanity and technology, like last year’s Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya, where Shahid Kapoor fell in love with a robot?
After raising these futuristic questions, Tushar Jalota’s Param Sundari slips back into the past. It’s a romance with gently swaying hair and chiffon saris and a last-minute airport intervention and a lot of homage. We get that scene from Swades where Shah Rukh Khan needs help tying a dhoti. We get that scene from Lamhe where a woman runs towards a man, and it turns out she was running towards someone behind him. We get that stretch from Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge where the hero decides to stay back and win the hearts of people close to the heroine. We get that junoon/sukoon line from Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. And a crucial event is set to ‘Yeh dil deewana’ from Pardes. There’s probably a few that I missed, but you get the idea.
The good news first. Unlike the cheesy trailer that suggested the state of Kerala was under attack, Param Sundari mocks stereotypes all around. Yes, the film checks off a whole list of Mallu-isms: Mohiniattam, coconut trees, boat race, Mohanlal, hot Malayali nurses, Kalari, Ayurveda… But when a dark man is mistaken for a Malayali, he shouts that he’s from the North. When a Sardar enters Kerala, there’s a joke that the state’s famed literacy rate has fallen a few points. When this same Sardar mistakes Pongal for Onam, he’s mocked as a UP-ite, despite being from Delhi. Sundari’s uncle (Renji Panicker) addresses Param as “butter chicken”, and when Param makes breakfast, of course it’s parathas. So what we really have is a culture-clash rom-com that just needed some basic writing and then let the lead pair and Sachin-Jigar’s pleasant music take over the rest.
There’s a hint of chemistry and decent writing in a confession scene set in a church. The climax, involving a coconut tree, is a fun reminder of the way Priyadarshan movies used to end. But mostly, Param Sundari has no personality of its own. The words you’d use for it are… generic, feel-good, time-pass! Janhvi’s Malayalam is shaky, but she does get the way many southerners speak Hindi: “ghatiya” becomes “gatiya”, “theek” becomes “teek”. She and Sidharth spark some fire in their one big confrontation scene, but otherwise (like the film) Param and Sundari are a generic, feel-good, time-pass couple. I guess this is what you’d call the ideal second-screen movie. It’s the kind of movie you switch on and keep watching from time to time as you work on your primary screen. They may not have meant it that way, but I guess Param Sundari ends up making a comment about today and technology after all.
