Dil Pasand review: Darling Krishna, Nishvika Naidu and Megha Shetty serve a dish that leaves a bitter aftertaste

1.5/5

Story: Software professional Santhosh (Darling Krishna) was a die-hard romantic in his childhood, a trait that his father (played by Rangayana Raghu) apparently set straight with an iron hand. When he’s then eventually of marriageable age, his parents find him a match in the ultra-traditional Minchu (Megha Shetty). But then, he meets Aishwarya (Nishvika Naidu), and everything goes topsy turvy.

Review: Last evening, I went to watch Dil Pasand with high expectations, which, looking back, I wonder why. I had chosen to forget that Darling Krishna was capable of leading duds like srikrishna@gmail.com and wanted to believe that he’s learnt to pick better projects. After all, this was coming shortly after Lucky Man, which I’d found quite enjoyable, and Krishna’s exact words earlier in the day were that Dil Pasand was a film that had him rolling in peals of laughter from start to finish during the script narration. Why then did I feel like I had walked into the screening of the wrong film?

Dil Pasand has been marketed as an intense love story with loads of comedy thrown in. Wait, what? The only intensity felt in this film was the passion between Santhosh and Aishwarya in one song, at the end of which they wake up together in one bed. Of course, this can only mean one thing, right? But the solution to a night of supposed drunken debauchery is not popping an emergency pill; it’s waiting 45 days to see if said passion led to an unwanted pregnancy after all.

That’s a month and a half of forcing the lead pair together and have love ‘blossom’ eventually. That’s also too much time in cinematic terms for a filmmaker to add enough cringe-worthy moments into the narrative and make the viewing nothing short of torture. Sadhu Kokila does some of the load bearing with what is meant to be comedy. He has short-term memory loss that his employees take advantage of. It is so short that it lasts for just one scene in the entire film. And mind you, Sadhu as Mahaling, does appear every now and then.

Krishna literally sleepwalks through his role; there’s nothing worthwhile to talk about his performance here. If you take his outing as Santhosh and put him in any of his other rom-coms, you’d probably not notice the difference. The actor doesn’t even make an effort to mix it up a bit with his look in the film. Here, he also gets a couple of action sequences, but they have no value add whatsoever to the narrative. 

Megha Shetty, who makes her Kannada film debut with Dil Pasand, gets the raw deal here. The langa-davani-clad Minchu, who objects to her ‘would-be’ hugging her, is friends with alcohol guzzling, smoking ‘modern women’, who change her overnight into a version of them in sky-high heels and figure-hugging outfits; someone who is now ready to take off on a pre-wedding photo shoot with Santhosh and do more than just hug. To her credit, Megha pulls off the outfits, but not the character so much. I wanted to bang my head somewhere during her ‘drunken’ scene. Paapa hudugi!

The only one who made some effort in the film is Nishvika, but sadly, it is wasted in a poorly written film. She looks good, although the issues in continuity become glaring with the breakouts on her face – the actress goes from ‘hello pimples’ to smooth skin and back every other scene. Ok, now I’m nit-picking, probably because of how irritated I was by the end of this film. Considering the travel time involved in getting to and from the venue of last night’s premiere and the film’s duration, that’s a quarter of a day gone to waste.

Verdict: Dil Pasand has been picked up by SunNxt (Udaya TV). Should you want to watch it, then, you might as well wait for it to come on the platform. We are not recommending it though!