Prem Keetanu

A mainstream remake of a non-Hindi-language movie is often a license to hijack, not adapt. If the original depends more on the treatment and cultural rhythm of an old formula, the imposter has nowhere to hide. Girish A.D.’s Malayalam romcom Premalu was about the scrambled identity of love and ambition for middle-class strivers who enter the adult world; it isn’t perfect (especially a copout airport climax), but the humorous ‘youngness’ of the film sells the point. But Apoorv Singh Karki’s Prem Keetanu is flattened by its Bollywood habits. It is tonally greedy, and the gentrified story is demarcated into genres: it starts out as a TVF-style campus-slacker comedy, morphs into a loud love triangle, collapses into echoes of an obsession tale, briefly flirts with the idea of a coming-of-age drama, and ends as a lightweight romcom. It has the grammar of a music-video montage, where every genre behaves like an entitled lover fending off one another to woo the reluctant viewer.