Tum Mile

Rating:**

An estranged couple comes together after a long gap,under trying circumstances. After ‘Jannat’,in which Kunal Deshmukh successfully parlayed the cricket match fixing scandal into a saleable flick,comes ‘Tum Mile’,in which the catastrophic Mumbai floods a few years ago become the backdrop for a re-uniting-the-lovers story.

When Akshay (Emraan Hashmi) and Sanjana (Soha Ali Khan) first meet,it is all milk and honey. He is a struggling painter and she is the not-very-spoilt daughter of a tycoon,who’s trying to make a life of her own. Love blossoms and lasts for a bit,till such mundane things as the monthly rent and food on the table becomes an issue: he never has the money,and she gets tired of bailing him out.

An airplane heading back to Mumbai is where they meet again,six years down the line,only to land smack in the middle of the worst floods that Mumbai has witnessed. Deshmukh’s penchant of mixing the real and the reel results in your being able to see where the documentary footage ends and the current stuff begins. The scenes when the rain becomes an unstoppable torrent absorb you,but never at any point do you feel that the lovers will perish,not even when the building they are sheltering in collapses around them.

That lack of tension tells on the film: the effective parts when the two are coming together and drawing apart get submerged by the way it wraps. Hashmi and Khan have a good fit,though,and their lovers’ tiffs feel real: Deshmukh has an ear for dialogue and gets his leads to spar in believable ways,especially when Hashmi behaves like a spoilt brat artist,and she an unrelenting career girl. Pity about the lax climax.

(shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com)