'Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar' Has Good Intentions, But Goes Astray

Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar opens as we are privy to a conversation between two men in a recklessly-driven car about which girl they would like to pick up - the one with lipstick or the one without. Suddenly, the road and their story takes a drastic turn and bullets are fired. We have no idea about what just happened and who those men in the car are. A few scenes later, we revisit the same sequence but this time from a vantage point that answers a few questions.

We still don’t know the whole story but it’s to the credit of Dibakar Banerjee and Varun Grover that we are willing to go along. The details bleed out slowly. The narrative moves forward, interspersed with flashbacks that help us make sense of the two principle characters on the run - Sandeep aka Sandy Walia (Parineeti Chopra), the svelte, immaculately-turned out successful banker now and Pinky (Arjun Kapoor), a suspended cop desperate to get his life back on track.

Devoid of excesses and dramatic highs, the sparseness with which Banerjee steers the story adds meaning and subtly. While mainstream Bollywood fares spell out every little detail and even hammer it repeatedly, Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar fervently sticks to its austerity.

It wants us to make up our minds about the character and their motivations without being nudged by the film to necessarily sympathise with them.

Pinky and Sandy aren't instantly likeable. In fact, their vacant impassive faces let out very little. The characters are flawed and how they choose to deal with their situations doesn’t make it easy for us to take sides as well. The film adopts an interesting lens to look at the class and gender divide. How social status, privilege, urban and rural divides have a bearing on one's life and how it pans out. The observations are more implicit than overt. Sandeep can’t make rotis but she adroitly understands money and can think up various schemes to multiply her dough. Pinky, who is sent by his handler, senior police officer Tyagi (Jaideep Ahlawat), to kidnap Sandeep ends up helping her escape to Nepal.

She is more head while he has more heart. Arjun’s signature absentminded look in this case works in his favour as he imbues Pinky with a certain vulnerability that is endearing.

Parineeti manages to draw us into the dark core of her character in a couple of powerful scenes, but the film for all its good intentions drifts along the periphery and meanders.

The lead actors have their limitations and that gets exposed when Neena Gupta and Raghubir Yadav come on screen. Playing a good-natured, middle-aged couple, they are so fabulous that they make us forget all about the two runaway characters.

One instead wishes to linger on and stay with them. And then just like that the film seems in a hurry to tie loose ends and the end appears like a hurriedly put together set up completely at odds with the unforced storytelling so far. Somewhere Pinky and Sandeep are unable to evoke the requisite emotional play-off necessary to keep us invested. Dibakar Banerjee conjures a world that sure is tantalising. However, the unhurried pace might prove to be too slow for comfort for many.

Our rating: 3 Quints out of 5