Subhash K Jha talks about Jodi Breakers

Just when you think you’ve seen them all, from the hit jodis to the split jodis comes Jodi Breakers… A jodi-daar pair, Madhavan and Bipasha Basu who set up a business of splitting couples…until they end up splitting the wrong couple. That’s when all hell breaks loose.

Interestingly the wronged couple is played by two model-turned-actors Milind Soman and Dipannita Sharma who are a class act, together and apart. Dipannita specially whom we saw some time ago in a chic avatar in Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl, makes you wonder why some ladies get left behind in the rat race. Or why any man would be stupid enough to leave a wife like Ms Sharma. That’s the thought which holds the shaky screenplay of Jodi Breakers together. That we often end up giving ourselves a wrong deal in the bid for love.

The concept of a pair falling in love as they go about breaking couples is interesting enough to hold a 2-hour long rom-com together. Lamentably the episodes showing a pile-up of desperately-estranged couples seeking to find an escape from marriage are hardly as amusing as one would expect them to be, given the situation.

At various places the screenplay simply slithers to a standstill waiting for the writer’s next brainwave. Until then there’s always the song break. The music is all of the safe variety, expansive ballads, a sexy item song…download-able waste.

The supporting cast is wretchedly half-formed. Omi Vaidya and gang seem to have a twinkle in their eye which could be the well-lit sets reflecting in their shadowy presence. Attempts at sexy jokes about condoms, over-sexed women, one-nights stands and unwanted pregnancies often end up being more sexist than sexy.

And some of the writing(like the sequence where Madhavan finds out Dipannita is pregnant, or the doctor barging in at the finale to expose the gold-digging vamp) is so awfully outdated you wonder what the director was doing when the writer tried to pass of these mortal remains of a dead idea.

The interlude in Greece, though shot with picture-postcard resplendence, could have easily been avoided. Efforts to raise the glamour quotient progressively lower the inherent strengths of the screenplay until the film faces imminent erosion and depletion. Luckily disaster is averted by a charming end-game featuring Helen as a feisty busybody Goan grandma.

Madhavan and Bipasha Basu’s screen presence goes a long way in covering up the film’s frail passages. They seem to vibe well together and bring a kind of shared empathy to the proceedings that seems to suggest there’s much more going on here than meets the eye. Madhavan in two dramatic key sequences holds the camera like a lover. Rest is brat-boy-fun-time stuff.

This could have been the perfect rom-com about an imperfect couple trying to make money out of broken-down relationships. Sadly, director Ashwini Choudhary fails to go the whole hog. Somewhere down the line the characters stop thinking and begin shrinking. They go through motions that are written for them. And not very convincing motions at that.

If the film works at all it’s because Madhavan and Bipasha make a cute couple and try to extract the maximum enjoyment from their under-written smart-on-top-shaky-at-the-bottom characters. Besides them you really won’t find too many side-splitting moments in this film about jodi-splittng.