Don’t Be Shy revolves around 20-year-old Shyamili “Shy” Das: that fourth-wall-breaking and self-involved student with a foolproof life plan, a rich boyfriend she needs, a hunky childhood friend she disowns, a trendy college she attends, a first name she’s ashamed of, a middle-class Bengali upbringing she hides, and a family shop she resents. Shy (Aarushi Bajaj) parents her fun-loving parents at home and plays the popular-cool-mean girl on campus. She’d be an influencer in most worlds, but her folks are apparently too poor to buy her a BlackBerry, so social media is ruled out. You know she’s going to be humbled and come of age, learn the value of authenticity, and get all her missteps settled with the neatness of shiny wrapping paper and a bow on top. But the question a movie like Don’t Be Shy unwittingly leaves you with is: Why are kids so annoying?
I can almost hear the don’t-be-an-oldie and this-genre-is-not-for-you accusations, but I don’t have to be grumpy and middle-aged to know that Shy is an objectively irredeemable person. It’s not entirely her fault. The fundamental problem with Indian young-adult (YA) romcoms is that they reduce girlhood (or boyhood) to a candyfloss template that’s derived from previous YA romcoms.
Even the messiness is supposed to be clean and cute. The recipe never changes: two boys, one cool teacher, one rival-cum-bff, one fallible idol, one college fest, one humble pie. The result is a loop of teeny-bopper artifice, and problematic characters posing as flawed-but-quirky Gen-Z dudes and dudettes. The dissonance is tonal, too: they think and cry and dance in English, but somehow converse in Hindi. They walk Hollywood and talk (meta) Bollywood.
There’s a semblance of a smart YA premise in the first ten minutes. It opens with Shyamili introducing us to her chaotic parents and feel-good locality; she’s the adult at home, and her parents happily lead a hand-to-mouth existence. There’s no dysfunctionality, but she manufactures it anyway. The second she reaches college as ‘Shy,’ it turns into a different movie altogether: a campus musical that, like every second modern Hindi romcom, has grown up on a staple of Shah Rukh Khan, K-dramas and Karan Johar entertainers. She sings, sways, goes into Poo mode, and pretends to be the cat’s whiskers. She swears by “pyaar, power and protein shaker” and snubs her impossibly handsome neighbour in public — the tall karate champion whom the film sees as an awkward introvert. The contrast between this girl’s domestic and wannabe life offers hope. Perhaps the dual personality is a narrative gimmick for a generation that can’t tell soulful from performative. Maybe it’ll lead to something edgier: a mental health condition, or a spiral that jolts the story out of its matcha-latte reverie.
But Don’t Be Shy isn’t shy to collapse into a heap of designer clichés. A hummable soundtrack does the heavy-lifting, and Shy’s evolution unfolds like a checklist: grow feelings for sibling-like guy, fight with warm parents, be surprised by seemingly bitchy rival, get stuck in a supermarket at night, have a wardrobe malfunction at a fashion show. The YA genre, though, feels like an excuse for more Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and Wake Up Sid homages, a Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na hangover, and inadvertent odes to Rok Sako To Rok Lo. The issue here is that Shy isn’t just whiny and unlikable. She’s a red flag disguised as a real striver, warts and all. Her narcissism isn’t stylish or cute, it grates and grinds until you stop caring about her situation. In other words, she does not deserve so much empathy and mercy from the people around her. Every time Shy realises she’s gone too far, it’s hard to imagine a way back. But hey, she’s growing up.
The performances are stranded between satire and seriousness; forgettable debuts are strewn across the board. The story of Shy is technically the story of the troublemaking friends who are usually relegated to the background of campus comedies; she’d be a passing subplot in most love stories. So the idea of legitimising her — giving her arc a separate movie of its own — is not a bad one. But the failing of Don’t Be Shy (please don’t) is that it doesn’t trust an inherently human setting and the complications of young identity, instead setting out to garnish it with all sorts of filmy gloss in order to soften the blow. The focus remains on the Instagram treatment and campy references, not the clumsiness of adolescence it pretends to explore.
At some point towards the end, you notice that Shy has at least five conflicts to resolve after hitting rock-bottom. It’s her comeback phase. After one of them — the usual heartfelt chat with a parent — the film panics and takes a shortcut. Live television (and a reality show audition) comes to the rescue because the story has run out of time; it kills four flightless birds with one clunky stone. Even her apology is multitasking. You know what this means: every character wronged across college, cars and offices is glued to the screen at the same time. The fourth-wall-breaking camera goes through an identity crisis. If only she had that phone. A tweet with crying emojis would have sufficed.