Love stories often don't work when the people involved in them are ignorant as heck. Katti Batti tries to literally adapt one such story and on the way goes on to define absurdity. Most words and phrases used in this review are selected from the film's idiotic dialogs so that you get a better idea as to what to expect.
For most of the part, a peppy, hip girl named Payal (Ranaut) who is a wandering rebel born to Page 3 celebrities who decided to go all the way on the backseat of a car during a drunken brawl, and who has more than 2500 friends on Facebook is brutally skirt-chased by a baby- faced Maddy (Khan) who makes pursuing architecture look like a short week of R&R, who has just about 500 friends on Facebook including 350 fake profiles that he does't know about, and who has an annoying sister. There is no conviction in the story as it adopts a fair non-linear screenplay. An introduction to the so-called quirky characters using a hand-held shot sequence is all there is to relish in the first half.
The screenplay looks like it has been stitched together using a defunct sewing machine by a one-legged tailor with retina inflammation. There is humor if you look for it, but the slapstick is so bad my senses now have finally learned to smile at Kapil Sharma's jokes.
Love is fine, relationships are fine, even breakups are fine, but you don't want to shell out money to watch grown ups behave like kids, now do you? One should blame the dodgy story for its construction and unbelievability factor for all we see is a mopey boyfriend and a courageous girlfriend who does not like being called a girlfriend. So lets call her a girlfriend just to annoy her.
Ranaut is an active participant in the drama while her co-actor is just a bystander. Since you all have given her the license, she overacts a bit too much in the sequences that required silence. All other characters are running behind our male protag so that he can forget about this "girlfriend" who dumped him without a reason. And the reason for the breakup is stupid, considering we are in 2015, when you know it.
All said and done, the film is surely high on creativity, but is highly low on cake on which this creativity should have been the icing.
BOTTOM LINE: With a turtle called Milkha (the irony!), Nikhil Advani's Katti Batti is what you get when you take relationships too seriously and literally and make a film about it. Wait for DVD; but buy only when its price goes down to INR 49 on Amazon. And why not use the Mobikwik cashback offer on it?
Grade: D-
Can be watched with a typical Indian family? YES
