Imagine a grown up young man smiling and talking on the phone every morning for hours together, sitting on his bed. He waits for these calls and loves these conversations he has. Romantic?
Now, imagine it's him on the other end of the line as well.
It's creepy when it happens the first few times but as the film progresses to show him spending long hours on the phone, it just turns amusing. So when his girlfriend tells him he needs psychiatric help, you tend to agree with her. Which is the fundamental problem with Karthik Calling Karthik. We must be siding with the hero at this point, halfway into the film, trusting his sanity.
But writer-director Vijay Lalwani does not try hard enough to make us believe that the calls the hero is getting are for real. Just to make the film more intriguing than what it seems, let me let you in on what the director assumes you know. Karthik is not imagining or hallucinating, he is really getting these calls.
Maybe because we have seen A Beautiful Mind or Fight Club , we are convinced quite early on in the film that he could be mentally ill. And we shouldn't be assuming this because, well, that phone is ringing and there's someone speaking to him. For real. It IS really him Karthik calling himself Karthik.
Once you watch the film with this mindset, you might find the rest of it a little more intriguing. The first half is immensely likeable with the strikingly fresh romance portions — episodes that define their relationship from the coffee at Khandala to the whiskey outside her apartment.
Deepika Padukone, looking hotter than ever, is once again wonderfully restrained. She's a natural, playing urbane characters and it's exactly that sort of underplaying that makes her a modern, world-class actor.
Farhan Akhtar is fantastic again, especially with his body language in the first act of the film. He doesn't seem too comfortable talking in that creepy voice at the other end of the line. But as Karthik, the guy who receives these calls, Farhan rocks on again in a role that's at the other end of the spectrum from his intense rock star image.
The climax spells out the mystery in ridiculously simplistic terms and the gross dumbing down would make Freud frown and leave the masses unimpressed. Anurag Kashyap fans would find a wink or two made at No Smoking (there's a similar moment here when the protagonist tries to run away by booking a ticket to a place he does not know himself). And the film packs in quite a few nice touches — like the Rubik's Cube that makes a rich understatement in the final frame of the film.
Overall, an exciting debut for Vijay Lalwani. Never mind the weak signals that disrupt the flow of conversation, this is one call you can take if you have the time.
Karthik Calling Karthik
Genre: Thriller
Director: Vijay Lalwani
Cast: Farhan Akhtar, Deepika Padukone, Ram Kapoor, Shefali Shah
Storyline: An introverted pushover, after life-changing phone calls from himself, gets a makeover and everything he wants… until he breaks a promise.
Bottomline: The romance portions alone make it worth your while but otherwise Boy having a steady obsessive, telephonic relationship with himself is amusingly creepy.
