Nobody notices the tall and nerdy IT support guy. He doesn’t mind it; “invisibility is my superpower,” he tells himself. He only longs to be noticed by the popular office girl. But she’s in a relationship with their tall and handsome boss, who is going through a messy divorce. A company trip to Japan beckons. Our nerdy guy makes a middle-class wish at a holy site: “if we could be together even for a day”. It’s a figure of speech that gets lost in translation. An accident happens, and popular girl wakes up with an amnesia specifically tailored to his wish. Her short-term memory is wiped out, but it will return in exactly one day. There’s one more symptom: she will permanently forget everything that unfolds in this one day. Boardgames have less elaborate rules. So our nerd does what any self-respecting romantic would: he pretends to be her boyfriend for the day. This is his chance. You know the rest. You know she’s going to find out, you know it will get ugly, and you know that science will be challenged by its greatest rival: the Bollywood heart.
And this is just from the trailer. A remake of the Thai film One Day (2016), Ek Din subscribes to the lost art of emotion-over-logic love stories. The ‘plot’ is evidence enough that it isn’t interested in making sense. It’s more concerned with making us suspend sense and succumb to the mood. Little did Goga Kapoor’s Don Anthony from Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa know that when he instructed his henchman Vasco to “note math karo, feel karo” (don’t note it down, just feel it), he was basically laying the foundation for what I like to call the Saiyaara Syndrome. The shadow of last year’s YRF hit looms large over Ek Din. It’s not just the female protagonist with a memory problem; it’s the craft of committing to the fantasy and finding a compatible language for it.
When done right — with a haunting soundtrack, a fresh cast, an eye and ear for the musicality of melodrama — the viewer doesn’t feel the need to obsess about a farcical premise and its silly details. When done with conviction, all that matters is the “how”. The predictability becomes a strength; you know what’s going to happen, but you still wait for it because you want to be swept away. You hope to wonder, not think. It’s a big swing in an age where modern audiences are prone to nitpicking because of dwindling attention spans. It’s why Saiyaara will remain a significant blueprint, and it’s why Ek Din didn’t mind giving it all away in the trailer.
It’s a boom-or-bust formula. If it works, there’s nothing like it. Our entire perspective can be altered. For instance, Ek Din would then be about a nerd so noble that even his lies have integrity. When Dinesh (Junaid Khan) makes a morally questionable choice of tricking Meera (Sai Pallavi) while she’s in the hospital, he declines to take further advantage of her; he insists they remain platonic so that they can enjoy the day as friends. It would be about how he has always genuinely observed her and looked out for her. It would be about how the snowy landscape in Sapporo supplies the warm chemistry between them. It would be about a loser who unnecessarily lies because he never trusted himself to win her over as the colleague who saved her life. It would be about how the background score appears at the perfect moments and reactions, thus papering over the plot contrivances. It would be about how Meghna Mishra’s version of the lilting title song is deployed in a scene that trades dialogue for music. It would be about a man so underconfident that one day of experiences for him is worth a lifetime of memories. It would be about Sai Pallavi managing to humanise the most ridiculous character arc. Basically, the fairytale aesthetic of the film would register more than its narrative architecture. We would all become a teary-eyed Don Anthony.
But then there’s the flipside. It’s a very thin line between good and bad. When the storytelling doesn’t work, the fall is steep. Every detail starts to feel faulty and kooky. The note-taking Vasco within us emerges. Gone are the rose-tinted lenses, and someone like Dinesh feels like a stalker and a sociopath who hides behind the garb of shyness. When he stands behind her in an elevator hoping to be seen, it looks more like obsession (Darr) than yearning (Ek Din). When his opening voice-over gushes about her as a girl who is “exclusive like Apple but syncs with everyone like Android” and speaks of his own gaze as that of a “poor child staring at a toy shop,” he comes across as a creep who needs therapy. When he lists down his observations about her laugh and face and habits culled from years of staring at her, he sounds like a red flag with stalker energy. When he decides to introduce himself as her boyfriend, his guilt remains at the whims of a dreamer disconnected from reality.
When he looks uncomfortable in his own body, it feels like Junaid Khan plays an introvert as if it’s a medical condition; Dinesh speaks and expresses himself like he’s intellectually diminished, the kind of broad-strokes acting that brings to mind Aamir Khan’s genre turns. When Meera’s boyfriend (Kunal Kapoor) turns out to be an Aditya-Pancholi-in-Yes-Boss character, he still appears to be better than Dinesh and his ‘cute’ deceptions. When Dinesh tries to cheer her up with a dance at one point, the two-left-feet visuals ruin the title track. When they spend that day together, it starts to look like a Japan tourism montage that makes you miss the end credits of Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. When she looks at him with love, his cloying innocence makes it feel as if she’s looking at him with sympathy. When Sai Pallavi acts for two, you wonder if Meera deserves the grace at all. When you come out of the movie humming the theme song, it does not necessarily imply that the movie left a lasting impression.
In other words, the shield of fiction collapses to reveal a film that fumbles the basics. By now, it’s obvious that Ek Din is more bust than boom. The notes outweigh the feelings. There’s a lack of interiority — a cultural emptiness in the storytelling (the rest of the album fails to register) — that stops the love from transcending the story. There are glimpses of a more brooding film when Meera is processing the magnitude of multiple male betrayals, but it’s too vanilla to go there. It just doesn’t have the personality to pull off a Saiyaara. You know how we form a mental image of strangers from their social media activity only to meet them and realise that they’re exactly like that. We often call that authenticity. But it can also be disappointing: no surprises, no X-factor, no add-ons. Ek Din is that stranger today. What you foresee is what you get.