Masand's Verdict: Delhii Heights

CONTEMPORARY COUPLE: Jimmy Shergill and Neha Dhupia play a married couple working in rival advertising companies.

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Cast: Jimmy Shergill, Neha Dhupia, Om Puri, Rohit Roy, Simone Singh, Vivek Shauq, Kamini Khanna

Direction: Anand Kumar

This week's new release Delhii Heights is a slice-of-life drama about the residents of an upscale building complex in the Capital. The film focuses on the personal ups-and-downs of the families that comprise this motley group.

Leading the pack are Jimmy Shergill and Neha Dhupia who play a married couple working in rival advertising companies. They're a couple that must deal with professional rivalry and trust issues just months into their marriage.

The other characters in this story include a philandering husband and his long-suffering wife, a middle-aged couple planning their daughter's wedding, a jovial neighbour who's been operating as a bookie, and a group of teenage boys who spend all their time chasing pretty young girls in their neighbourhood.

Now there's no real plot to this film, evidently it's positioned itself as a character-driven picture, but in that respect it falls flat on its face because the rule for any character-driven film is that its characters be interesting enough to be able to pull the film purely on their strength, but the characters in Delhii Heights are dull, uni-dimensional and have no personality at all.

The script is a gross miscalculation on the part of the film's director and its writers as it fails to establish the sense of community that it's going for.

Delhii Heights struggles to set itself up as an ensemble piece about a close-knit group of neighbours and friends, but dancing together at a neighbour's wedding or gathering at one of their homes to watch a cricket match is just too superficial, and sadly it's not enough to suggest that sense of kinship.

The issues and concerns that the protagonists of Delhii Heights are confronted with seem so trivial and domestic that you're tempted to dismiss it as a television serial in the guise of a feature film. But truth is, even soaps today have begun to go beyond those traditional themes of domestic squabbles and cheating spouses. What's worse about this film is the carelessness in its execution.