Cast: Ranbir Kapoor, Konkona Sen Sharma, Rahul Khanna, Anupam Kher, Supriya Pathak, Namit Das, Shikha Talsania

Director: Ayan Mukherjee

Rating:***

Siddharth Mehra is a good-looking, rich lay-about. He drives his father’s expensive cars, flashes plastic at designer stores, and works very hard at partying. The future is very far away ; today is all there is, and it’s all about having fun. Aisha Banerjee, new arrival in Mumbai, is everything he’s not : she wants to do something, be something, on her own her steam.

`Lassoo’ lad, driven lass : Ayan Mukherjee’s debut feature has opposites Ranbir and Konkona attracting in a setting which is borrowed straight out of his producer Karan Johar’s idiom. Stylish décor, zippy lines, and well-dressed people living in Bombay not Mumbai, speaking Hindi which sounds like English : `isse zyada achcha aur kya ho sakta hai’, says the cool editor of a cool city magazine after a jazz riff is over, and you can almost hear the `what could be better than this’ underneath.

You fear for unlikely couple Ranbir and Konkona, because when they meet, it’s not cute enough: she’s older and he’s younger ( she keeps calling him a `bachcha’), and they are much too fraternal for their own good, even when they share the same bed. Individually, both do well. Ranbir is effortlessly charming as the lazy dude with a heart, and Konkona rises a little out of her usual grid. She reads Murakami, he skims through comics, and the twain do not look made for each other. `Wake Up Sid’ succeeds only partly in being a sweet rom com : the false starts, and the too-long period of being `just good friends’ feels real, but you wish there was more going on between the friends-who-turn-into-lovers. Sid and Aisha spark, but only towards the end of the film.

... contd.