‘Sanam re’ boasts of great visuals and chart buster music and other than that, there is nothing to watch out in the film! The second directorial venture of Divya Khosla Kumar after ‘Yaariyan’ is definitely not better or we can even term it ‘worse’. Also, the movie is said to be a sweet love-story but there wasn’t any striking chemistry either between Pulkit-Yami and Pulkit-Urvashi in it! Watch this movie only for its picturesque views and lovable music.
To be fair with the team of Sanam Re, it’s not a bad watch. It’s not a great watch either. The film starts off on a promising note, but soon goes off the track. However, it could still be your Valentine’s movie. We know how desperately you need it!
The befuddling, undercooked storyline is sure to leave most viewers wondering where it actually begins and where it ends. Sanam Re is a juvenile jumble that is undecipherable. director Divya Khosla Kumar redefines the 'art' of going around in circles and returning to the same point after every 15 minutes or thereabouts. Never has a two-hour film felt as long as this story of a small-town boy Akash (Pulkit Samrat) whose dreams hinge on getting hitched to a girl who lives down the lane, 500 steps, to be precise, away from his home. Sanam Re is a surefire cure for insomnia. Its air of somnolence is so pervasive that a yawn a minute is absolutely guaranteed.
Sanam Re is a series of shabby, senseless music videos sounding off monotonous melody that believes in love at first sight between preteens because grandpa forecasted so and paints romance as wooden actors caught in an endless snowstorm. Worse, it offensively presumes that the audience will break into splits at its homophobic, racist gags or Manoj Joshi mispronouncing (and misquoting) Shakespeare. There’s also stand-up comedian Bharti Singh as a new-age lifestyle guru at the afore-mentioned camp mouthing humour so vile even her straight face can’t conceal. In this schizophrenic rubbish -- for it’s certainly not a script, hardly a synopsis -- landscapes change faster than its cast’s wardrobe and characters suddenly appear or mysteriously vanish at the director’s whim. Divya Khosla Kumar even shows up in front of the camera, early on in an item song, vacuously gazing in and out of a medium she’s clearly struck by but just doesn’t get.
A treat to the eyes, Divya Khosla Kumar's bittersweet love story is a visual delight. Gorgeously shot, every frame captures the beauty of the snow-clad mountains, narrow roads and cozy villages of Himachal. The music stays with you, Pulkit Samrat renders a mature performance and the girls look pretty. What begins as a pursuit of happiness tale soon loses grip and succumbs to cliche. The plot has loose ends with no backstories to justify the steps its characters take. Unless you consider Himachal as your Sanam, this heartbreaking tale on sacrifice and unrequited love, loses its plot and purpose somewhere along the way, re.