Think of every Delhi-based, Punjabi-centric Bollywood movie you’ve ever seen. A brash, outspoken girl. A sweet and sensitive guy who falls madly in love. Crazy parents and an abysmal amount of conversations surrounding paneer, daaru and shaadi. Well, I’ve just described Ginny Weds Sunny to you.
Written by Navjot Gulati and Sumit Arora, directed by Puneet Khanna and starring Yami Gautam, Vikrant Massey, Ayesha Raza and Suhail Nayyar Ginny and Sunny’s lives keep meeting and intertwining, but the talented star cast isn’t enough to salvage a dull script. And that’s where Ginny Weds Sunny fails to succeed: at making a story authentic to its characters alone, without incorporating moth-eaten Bollywood and Punjabi clichés. Shobha (Raza) is a matchmaker who isn’t able to find her own daughter Ginny (Gautam) a match. Ginny hasn’t moved on from Nishant (Nayyar) with whom she’s still friends. Sunny (Massey), the guy around the block, has been in love with Ginny since school but hasn’t had the balls to make a move. However, Shobha encourages him and he begins his wooing process. This is done by constantly showing up everywhere that Ginny is, even coming off as creepy and stalker-ish at times. But I guess it’s not because Ginny’s own mother asks him to…?
The premise is interesting, but immediately morphs into yet another predictable romom — the title is its biggest giveaway. A story about millennials struggling with love and marriage, often oscillating from one to the other, becomes drawn out, filled with the same dialogues about being in love and then being burnt, the same music recipe (one wedding number, one Badshah number, one sad, one love and one happy song).
Ginny and Sunny grow closer through the film, but their relationship feels forced and inorganic. Vikrant Massey is a fine, talented actor whose diverse portfolio speaks lengths about how much he understands his characters. Yami Gautam is charming but lacks a strong screen presence, and plays Ginny so that she’s likeable enough, but also far too predictable. Sunny is sweet and fun, and entirely believable. Ayesha Raza, one of the most talented contemporary actresses, is yet again sucked into a typecast role of Delhi Mom. While this script had so many chances to go wild with Shobha’s antics, it just limited her screen time, making her more of a caricature than a character.
There was a lot of potential here, potential that just didn’t lead up to anything. It fizzled out, like the end of the movie, which was a disappointment. Ginny and Sunny’s ego clashes brought moments of entertainment, but those weren’t enough to sustain a whole movie. Nishant, played by Nayyar, is a delight to watch and I wish there was more of him. Nishant and Ginny shared far more chemistry than Sunny and Ginny did. And when they’ve known each other for that long, it doesn’t make sense that things as cliched like Sunny eating at a dhaba would make Ginny choose Massey’s character.
All in all, Ginny Weds Sunny is the filtered-down product of a thousand romcoms merged into one. Every cheesy romcom moment is in this, but not in some newly spun manner. It’s a clichéd cliché with an added layer of annoying characters and dialogues that seem to be ripped off from every previous Bollywood film with a typically ‘fearless’ heroine and ‘romantic’ hero.
If you really want to stop thinking for two hours, watch Ginny Weds Sunny. But mind you, the spoiler is in the title itself.
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