How not to make a movie, even in Hindi

I used to post a lot of movie reviews on this blog, but for some reason that no longer happens, even though we possibly watch more films and series than ever due to Netflix and the like. 

Having got a little irritated with the way Netflix presents what it thinks you should watch on its main screen, we hopped off to the search section last night looking for something a bit different. We got something different all right. The Girl on the Train, an adaptation of the novel by Paula Hawkins. 

Oh, yes, you say, that was the movie with Emily Blunt, and it wasn't too bad. Except this wasn't the movie with Emily Blunt. This was another movie adaptation, in this case a Hindi production with a mostly Hindi cast. And it was bad. 

The story made little sense, especially since the director decided to flick back and forth between the present, the immediate past, the possible past, the definite past past, and possibly some other variations. Much of the time you had no idea where you were. 

The main actress, Parineeti Chopra, may be able to act - I really don't know. If this was the only movie of hers you ever saw, you would think she'd come out of the 19th century melodrama period, when overacting was the order of the day. She spends an inordinate amount of time emoting, bursting into tears, getting drunk and drunker (but in fact she's not actually drunk as much as it appears, as we learn), getting hit by a car, getting hit on the head (which requires a dodgy piece of makeup that never quite looks real and which Chopra seems to forget about frequently), screaming at mirrors, threatening to kill the person she supposedly had sympathy for, and for some reason videoing this on her phone and keeping it there, in spite of it being a thing likely to put her in prison. 

The list goes on and on. Not everything is Chopra's fault; the script is absurd. In better hands, perhaps (I haven't seen the Emily Blunt version) the story might work. Here it's nothing but a series of coincidences, and it seems as though the writer is pushing everything to work even when it can't possibly. So much makes no sense at all. 

And then characters spend half there time speaking Hindi and half English, even though they live in London. In fact they're likely to switch between the two languages mid-sentence. Fortunately there are subtitles almost throughout because otherwise you'd have no idea which language the characters were speaking. Characters are introduced without any giving the viewer any idea who they are, and they vanish just as easily. 

The production crew plainly did little research as to the way police detectives in London dress, or how they behave (slapping a suspect on the face?); the number of inane things the main detective does make you wonder if she'd ever been trained as a detective.

Amnesia is used as a convenient way of keeping vital information from the viewer. And from Chopra's character. Too convenient for words. 

And then, the three main male characters all look alike enough as to completely confuse the viewer. I thought there were only two main male characters and later wondered who the third guy was since he had a different name from the previous time we'd met him. In fact I thought it was Chopra's husband in the story who was having an affair with the woman Chopra keeps seeing from a train (a train that goes alongside the Thames in the middle of London?) Nope, it was the woman's own husband, who mostly vanishes from the story without anyone making any comment, after having confused me by looking like Chopra's husband. 

Is there anything to commend this movie? If you like a bit of Bollywood there's a dance scene at a wedding at the beginning. The fact that it's completely different in tone to anything else in the movie makes it stick out like a sore thumb. Other than that it's all dark and gloomy. 

I'm writing a book at present that has some intricate aspects to the plot. In fact, I've been writing it for some time because of these intricacies. So I know how difficult it can be to create a mystery and find yourself getting stuck or tangled. The writers of this movie had no qualms about getting stuck: they just sailed through come what may, and assumed the audience would sail along with them. I can't imagine anyone doing so.