Film Review: Nadaaniyan [Innocence]

This debut of Bollywood stars Saif Ali Khan and Amrita Singh’s son, Ibrahim Ali Khan, dropped on Netflix recently and has been making waves for the wrong reasons. The romcom, complete with another star-kid in Sridevi and Boney Kapoor’s younger daughter Khushi Kapoor, has not hit the right mark with most viewers; let’s find out why…

Pia Jaisingh (Kapoor) is, at first glance, a typical spoilt rich kid from an uber-rich Delhi legal eagle family – the Jaisinghs. Her parents Neelu (Chaudhry) and Rajat (Shetty) adore her but there is no love lost between them, with the latter quite openly playing away. This unhappy home environ is on the brink of being exacerbated for Pia by a brewing rift within her privileged private school gang over a misunderstanding with her best friend involving her love interest.

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To throw all her social media followers off the scent, Pia decides to pay hunky new scholarship student Arjun Mehta (Khan) a hefty sum to pretend to be her devoted boyfriend. The plan is set into motion and proves successful, as not only do her friends buy into this blossoming love story but so do their families.

Soon enough, Pia and Arjun find themselves drawn to each other for real. But with Neelu and Rajat’s doomed marriage hurtling towards an inevitable divorce, will this budding romance survive the roller-coaster of emotions or will teenage angst set them on divergent paths away from each other?

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Unfortunately, there is very little going for what was intended as an innocent little love story. While newcomer Ibrahim Ali Khan has some talent lurking somewhere behind that uncanny resemblance with his dad Saif, it fails to be properly tapped into by this extremely lacklustre script. The inspiration from Hollywood meet-cute romances such as the ‘To All the Boys…’ franchise is obvious, given the Gen Z setting, but where this Bollywood attempt falls flat is in some proper character definition. The result is that Khushi Kapoor, who had shown some promise in her debut ‘The Archies’, is also left flailing as this aimless romantic comedy meanders its way to a climax that could not come sooner.

A special word for the masterly Archana Puran Singh, who reprises her ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’ role of Miss Braganza and manages to steal the show with just a handful of scenes spouting misjudged Gen Z slang!