My Story

Roshni Dinaker’s Bollywood textured My Story is a shallow fragile idea that tries the melodramatic approach and mostly fails. The idea is to nourish the story with vibrant images and make us get the feeling of romance, but the back and forth drama is so cluttered that you just end up waiting for the end of the story that you might have already predicted.

One part of the story is set in the mid 90’s where Jayakrishnan, an aspiring actor gets his first movie with that time’s south sensation Tara. The film basically looks at what happened between Tara and Jay during the shoot of the first film from a flashback narrative that has a new Jay who is a superstar in Malayalam now.

First and foremost, Prithviraj should really consider not using a wig if he isn’t playing any real-life figure. I am saying this because seeing him as that young Jay with that wig is a big distraction and as far as the movie goes, I don’t see any particular relevance in having that particular look. Coming to the movie, like I said in the beginning, the Bollywood influence is clearly there in the visual grammar and also in the structuring of scenes. The meeting scene in Tamasha + Matargashti, award speech in Om Shanti Om and many other similar moments are there which reduces the novelty of this movie written by Shanker Ramakrishnan. As the movie tries to become more and more romantic, the cringe-worthy moments’ increases. The chemistry between the actors saves the movie many a time when it tries to act like an Aashiqui.

If those past portions in the movie worked, the climax would have sounded like a very realistic feel good one. But Roshni Dinaker and Shanker Ramakrishnan infuse so much of events in that flashback portion, you get bored of the lack of conviction. Even in a movie like Tamasha, Imtiaz Ali was able to let us know why they connected. Here the pattern is way too predictable and the construction has a lot of cheesy elements. Cinematography just focuses on the visual lushness. The edits are really tacky in the first half and Lijo Paul gets into the rhythm only in the second half. The first half even has back to back songs without much foundation. The album from Shaan Rahman is a good one that sort of stays away from his usual pattern.

Prithviraj as the older version of Jay was really convincing. Whereas the younger one, he can’t really get into the skin of a new guy who has no clue about a foreign country and he doesn’t even act like a guy who had worked hard to reach that point. For me, Parvathy was the only saving grace. She delivers her lines very organically. Even in that stage sequence where the melodramatic dialogues spoil the realness, she sort of manages to reduce the cringe to an extent and she was able to give a clear distinction between the mother and daughter. Ganesh Venkataraman, Manoj K Jayan, Nandhu etc are the other prominent actors in the cast who have very little to perform.

My Story is a movie that lacks a solid foundation. It is hard to root for the romance between characters when you can’t really get the reason why a romantic equation was formed over a small period of time. If you are a fan of most of Mohit Suri’s movies, then this one might be a passable one for you.

Rating: 2/5