“Do you think you’re Superman?” Meera (Sai Pallavi) scolds her colleague Dino (Junaid Khan) after he nearly gets run over saving a child who wanders into traffic. He protests, and he’s right to. Dino is uncoordinated, underconfident, uncertain. His dorky square glasses are there so he can see properly, and even these are held together with tape and a safety pin. Forget Superman, he a barely functional Clark Kent.
If there’s anyone with a superhero complex in Ek Din, it’s Gurgaon startup CEO Nakul (Kunal Kapoor), who announces a five-day vacation in Japan for the entire team (in this economy?) so he can stay back with Meera, with whom he’s in a clandestine affair. She knows he’s married, but finds out on the trip that he has no intention of leaving his wife. Distraught, she drinks herself blind and stumbles into a freezing forest at night. Luckily, this is an Indian film, where you can always count on your benign stalker to step up when needed.
Meera wakes up the following day with no memory of the past two years. She's shocked when Dino, who's secretly, madly in love with her, is revealed not only as her saviour but her co-worker. The doctor assures her memories will return in exactly a day—transient global amnesia, an affliction so hopelessly cinematic it scarcely seems real. Dino is assumed to be her boyfriend; instead of correcting the doc, he doubles down, giving his name as Nakul. The two of them leave the hospital as the strangest, shortest potential situationship.
Dino’s deception is only so he can show Meera, a Japan nut with a wish list she’s been compiling for years, the best day possible… even if she won’t remember they were together. It’s a wistful idea, but treated with lightness, if not subtlety. When they end up at the Sapporo Snow Festival, the metaphor is literally melting in front of us, but Meera says it anyway: why make such beautiful sculptures if they won’t be around tomorrow? And Dino replies: sometimes one day is enough.
Sunil Pandey’s Ek Din is the first proper post-Saiyaara film, not in the sense of influence or imitation (Pandey’s film was actually shot before Mohit Suri’s), but as a genuine point of comparison. Both are unabashed romances that revolve around loss of memory; both are inspired by East Asian films, though only Ek Din acknowledges its source, the 2016 Thai film One Day. But apart from this, the films are entirely opposed in treatment and tone. Ek Din is sweet, contained, hopeful. Saiyaara is tortured, jangly, doomy. One turns you gently toward the light; the other turns you inside out.
As I watched the film, I thought Sneha Desai and Spandan Desai’s dialogue writing was occasionally amusing, often corny, but that their screenplay clicked into place satisfyingly. But after looking up the Thai film, I'd pass on that credit to its writers. Ek Din not only takes most of its plot from One Day but also details ranging from crucial to throwaway: Dino being so unmemorable that the security guard in his office doesn’t recognise him; a wish-granting bell that kicks off his fairytale; a proposal that goes from trainwreck to triumph; Meera blanching when she’s told uni sushi is sea urchin testicles. It’s the second Aamir Khan production in two years after Sitaare Zameen Par that’s content to remake a foreign film by just translating it and changing a few details. There’s nothing wrong with this, but I’m surprised Aamir finds it a worthwhile challenge.
Ek Din opens with Dino saying he’s boring and invisible, a claim he reiterates through the film. This leaves Junaid Khan in a tight spot. He sells Dino’s awkwardness, but, when the time comes for him to be magnetic and the film to start cooking, he looks stricken. There’s a scene at the end where he breaks down that had the hall giggling—a shakily directed, thinly written scene, yet one that most Hindi stars in decades past, let alone Junaid's dad, would’ve eaten for breakfast.
Thankfully, there’s Sai Pallavi. Meera isn’t much of a character, a make-a-wish child on whom Dino’s goodness can be projected. But Pallavi, in her Hindi film debut, imbues her with charm and courage. Her open, expressive face is a map to Meera’s mental state on the weirdest possible day, from excitement to shame to confusion to revival and back to confusion. If Khan and the makers had been able to keep up, Ek Din might’ve been something. Instead, it’ll probably end up a faded memory of a few hours spent on a forgotten day.
‘Ek Din’ is in theatres.
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