Laila Majnu

  • 15 Sep - 21 Sep, 2018
  • Omair Alavi
  • Reviews

Not every debutant in Bollywood is Aamir Khan, neither every female actress who makes her film debut is Juhi Chawla. Thirty years after Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak was released, Imtiaz Ali presents Laila Majnu that has more or less the same format but doesn’t fare like the Bollywood classic. In fact, with Tripti Dimri as Laila and Avinash Tiwari as Qais, it doesn’t register itself as a powerful film and is likely to fade away after a week on this side of the border.


Written by Imtiaz Ali and his brother Sajid, the film suffers from bad direction by the latter who makes his debut through this eternal love story that revolves around one Laila and one Qais who fall in love while he is literally peeing over her in a graveyard (eeeeew!) and stalks her including watching her from his car through binoculars. She, on the other hand, has a reputation of being the biggest flirt in Kashmir and is stupid enough to go and meet her lover the very day her father makes her promise she will not meet the guy. The rest of the cast is just there to take the story forward and the tragic end (what else did you expect) came too late for the audience.

Set in the modern century, with an experienced director the film could have done well but with a newbie backed by ‘elder bro’, it was bound to go down. The new actors are talented and look good on screen but they don’t have the kind of pull like Aamir Khan-Juhi Chawla, Hrithik Roshan-Amisha Patel etc. had. The dialogues were way too predictable and so was the story but what was surprising was the fact that the Imtiaz Ali touch was missing big time. With an average music score, Laila Majnu will be remembered as another attempt to recreate the classic tale of love, but that love was lost on the audience of 2018. •

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