Wedding Season Review: Pallavi Sharda and Suraj Sharma's romantic comedy is cliched, but is a feel-good entertainer

2.5/5

Story: Under parental pressure to find spouses, Asha (Pallavi Sharda) and Ravi (Suraj Sharma) pretend to date each other — but their plan goes awry as they end up in falling in love with each other even as they struggle to balance who they are with who their parents want them to be.

Review: Two young people deciding to pretend to be in a relationship, but end up falling in love with each other is one of the most popular tropes in a romantic comedy and Wedding Season, too cashes in on the same plot. There are pushy parents who want their children to settle down in life at the earliest by finding a spouse, their children seeming totally disinterested in the idea and the youngsters trying to balance who they are and who their parents want them to. The plot is quite similar to what we have watched in many other movies in the genre.

Asha Mourya (Pallavi Sharda) is employed at a microfinancing investment firm, where she’s trying to create opportunities for women in Southeast Asia so that they can venture into their own businesses. As the wedding season is in full swing, her mother signs her up on a matchmaking site and makes her agree to meet Ravi Shah (Suraj Sharma), who entered MIT at 16, and attend a series of weddings.

Asha and Ravi's first meeting at a diner over some cheeseburgers and sloppy fries, ends up in the duo exchanging barbed words and agreeing upon the fact that their relationship would never take off. And we as the audience know that it's definitely going to happen. Eventually, they decide to attend the weddings together to escape the prying eyes of the nosy Indian aunties and to get out of the traditional matchmaking business. As they dance in one wedding after another in beautiful attires, soon sparks fly and they end up falling in love with each other. Predictably, there is a story of deception, followed by a minor separation. The happily-ever-after here happens at the biggest wedding, that of Asha's sister, Priya, who is the first one to marry a white man in the family, the only noticeable white character in the film.

There is a token inter-religious wedding, too, where Asha's eyes well up and ends up displaying her emotional side. Add a love story of her mother from the past and it's a complete package of romantic comedy stereotypes.

In the meantime, on the work front, Asha finally manages to succeed in her pitch with a personal story, which of course, when her boyfriend advises her to do so. It is unbelievable that none of the family members nor Asha bothered to find out what Ravi really did for a living. While on hand, he seemed to be jobless and broke, he also seemed to have invested in stocks and was rolling in money at the same time. His relationship with his folks, too, didn't seem quite convincing.

Wedding Season is laced with all these predictable elements, but despite all tried and tested formulas, what makes director Tom Dey's film watchable and entertaining are the actors in it, who own their characters. The lead actors Pallavi Sharda and Suraj Sharma, and the supporting cast including Rizwan Manji, Veena Sood, ari Afsar, Sean Kleier and Manoj Sood, all pull off a decent performance and keep the audience enthralled. Pallavi Sharda is convincing as Asha though her character could have been sketched better. And it's good to see Suraj Sharma break away from his Life of Pi character and pull off the role of romantic in the film. Wedding Season is a feel-good one-time watch.

Verdict: Wedding Season is full of stereotypes but makes for an entertaining one-time watch.