This is a perfect little light movie to watch on a Saturday morning while folding laundry.  Doesn’t really deserve a Friday Classics review, but I can’t help sharing my joy in watching it!  Especially since it is on Netflix now, so the vast majority of you can watch it too.

Such a silly movie!  It’s more about watching Shahid Kapoor make cute faces under his bangs than any sort of “plot”.  It’s the kind of film where saxophone cues tell you how to feel at any given moment, and the ending is a romantic embrace in front of 7 very fake looking rainbows.  The songs are 60s influenced, the colors are comic book influenced, and the actresses are mannequin influenced.

But boy do I love it!  This is the kind of ridiculously silly plot and light film that no one is brave enough to make any more.  Probably because this movie flopped so horribly when it came out, and so did all the other movies that came out in the early 2000s that were like it.  I wish it hadn’t flopped, and I wish more movies like this were still being made.  Oh well, maybe it will find an audience now that it is in Netflix and you can just try it out without committing and fall in love with it.

It might help if you want to feel nostalgic for the early 2000s.  There’s CD stores and desktop computers and male bead necklaces and teased bangs!  It’s like a little time capsule in movie form!

(See?  So 2000s!)

Oh and it’s also completely stress free.  Since there are 3 separate plots and it’s only a 2 hour movie, they all kind of resolve as soon as they start.  And when you get bored with one, no worries, here comes another!  I’ll go into SPOILERS to show you what I mean.

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We open with a bit of a riddle.  Our hero Shahid gets off the train at his home town and people immediately start asking “where is she?  I thought you were bringing her back with you.”  He goes home, his mother asks him too.  He looks all sad, says she isn’t with him.  And then we go back to the beginning to find out who this “she” is and why everyone thought she was coming home with him.

Our hero, Shahid, is the best handsomest smartest blah blah of his small hill station.  Only it’s not enough for his college girlfriend Soha Ali Khan, after 4 years studying together in the hill station college, she wants to go off to the big city and become an air hostess.  They have a big fight because Shahid can’t see why anyone would ever want to leave the hill station, plus it’s where his family is from, they own the local college, and so on and so on.  After she leaves, he is all miserable, so with the encouragement of his mother and her father, who both thought they were going to make a match, he goes off to Bombay to stay until he can convince her to come home with him.

He gets off the train in Bombay and literally runs into Ayesha Takia, a loud angry local girl who is furious with him for running into her and yells at him for being a country bumpkin.  And yells even more when she thinks he has followed her home, not realizing he is using the apartment of a family friend in the same building.  His bad day continues when he tracks Soha down at her training program and she is all “I’m happy here!  I don’t want to go back to the hill station and marry you!”  But, he is determined to stay and convince her.

So he gets a job at a CD store with co-worker Tulip Joshi and humorous boss Gulshan Grover.  And makes friends with saintly Zarina Wahab downstairs, mother of Ayesha, who makes him dinner every night and leaves it outside his door.  The city isn’t that bad after all!  Gulshan suggests he go out for tea with Tulip to cheer himself up, and they get to talking about his home town, she wants to go see it because it sounds beautiful.  She goes home with him and loves everything there and wants to stay forever.  Could this be his perfect bride?  The one who loves his hometown just like he does?

But then Tulip gets a mysterious phone call and leaves, he comes back to the city to find her and can’t, until he runs into her with another man!  She explains that she was fighting with her boyfriend, that’s why she wanted to leave town for a while, but now they are back together and happier than ever.  Shahid, having had his heart broken twice, sadly goes back home to say good-bye to Zarina Wahab.  He asks to use her computer, and SURPRISE!!!  There is a long diary on the computer written by Ayesha all about how she loves him but doesn’t want to get hurt so acts like she hates him.  She was the one leaving food outside his door every night, waiting for him to come home every night, and so on and so forth.  So now he is in love with her.  And everything is great!  Briefly.

Until Soha surprises him in his apartment and Ayesha walks in on them together.  He rejects Soha and tries to get rid of her, but Ayesha still won’t listen to him.  He goes in to work, thinks he sees her there, but no!  It’s Tulip! Who says she is in love with him now.  And Ayesha walks in on the two of them, and is even angrier.  Shahid rejects Tulip too, says Ayesha is the only one he loves.

Finally, heartbroken, he returns home.  Which is the opening of the film, him all sad missing her.  Until his mother tells him to go to the soccer field, there is a surprise, and there is Ayesha!  She came for him!

You know in it’s own stupid way, this movie is kind of a nice lesson about what makes a good relationship.  With Soha, it was habit and routine after 4 years.  And she was right to want to leave for the city, they wanted different things in life.

But with Tulip, all they had was wanting the same things in life.  He didn’t really love her and she didn’t really love him, he just loved that she loved his hometown and she loved him for his hometown.

Ayesha, that’s the real love.  Because all they want is to be together.  He doesn’t mind staying in Bombay with her, she doesn’t mind going to his hometown.  Love makes it all work.

I also like the lesson that our hero isn’t exactly fickle, it’s more that he had to keep trying on romances until he found the right one, and once he found it, that was it.  Soha was never right, because he was able to be distracted by Tulip.  And Tulip wasn’t right, because he was able to get over her so easily once he knew Ayesha was there.  There’s a lot of talk about fickle and shallow romances, Gulshan Grover plays a ladies man player type who always has a new girlfriend.  Ayesha doesn’t trust Shahid or any man because her father left her mother.  But there’s a difference between their betrayals and what Shahid is doing.

Shahid just wants more!  He wants Soha to love him more, and then Tulip, and finally he finds all the love he wants in Ayesha and then he is not going to let it go.  Not when it is finally real love.

(Well, and the heart also wants Pepsi.  I am aware that the title is referring to Shahid’s at this point most famous appearance onscreen)

Oh, and there’s also a soap opera-esque fight on a cruise ship between all 3 women, you don’t want to miss that!