Sachin Khedekar's glasses keep sliding down the bridge of his nose in the second half, and after the fourth time he pushes them back up with the back of his thumb, you stop watching the dialogue about conservative fathers and cultural preservation because you are just waiting for the frame grease to catch the light again. Gautam Menon's 2012 romantic drama Ekk Deewana Tha arrives with the heavy baggage of being a remake of a massive regional hit, though if I'm honest, nobody outside the trade papers seemed to care about the Tamil pedigree when the posters dropped. Prateik Babbar plays Sachin, an aspiring mechanical engineer who would rather write screenplays and stare at damp balconies than calculate load-bearing walls. Amy Jackson steps into the shoes of Jessie, a fiercely guarded Malayali Christian woman whose family occupies the ground floor of Sachin's rented house, creating that claustrophobic proximity where every slammed door sounds like an invitation. Hindi movies have long relied on this precise kind of stairwell architecture to spark romance, but here the concrete steps feel grubbier, salt-stained from the Mumbai monsoon, less like a stage set and more like an actual housing society where neighbours complain about the plumbing.

The screenplay operates on a strange frequency, jumping back and forth from a film set where Sachin is now an assistant director nursing a broken heart to the sun-bleached Kerala backwaters where the relationship actually rotted from the inside out. Menon directs both versions of this story with an infuriating fondness for golden-hour lens flare that makes every afternoon in a suburban transit camp look like a luxury car commercial. You get long tracking shots of bicycles moving past palm trees while Amy Jackson stares into the middle distance with an expression that suggests she is either deeply troubled by love or simply trying to remember if she turned off the stove. Babbar matches this by running his hands through his unwashed hair with an intensity that crosses over from desperate youth into something slightly irritating. Manu Rishi pops up as an opportunistic producer who treats every emotional crisis as potential box-office gold, providing a dry, cynical counterweight to the operatic misery unfolding between the leads. Ramesh Sippy makes a cameo appearance as himself, which feels less like an Easter egg and more like a bizarre executive decision designed to wake up the front rows during a sluggish patch before intermission.

A.R. Rahman provides the musical scaffolding, and it is honestly the only reason the narrative doesn't completely collapse under its own leaden pacing. The soundtrack loops through motifs that will be painfully familiar to anyone who sat through Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa, yet these compositions retain a haunting, slippery quality that rescues the flattest scenes. When the title track kicks in during a train station sequence, the editing suddenly finds a rhythmic pulse it lacked for the preceding forty minutes, cutting between close-ups of luggage tags and rain-streaked windowpanes with a sharp, aggressive clarity. Cinematographer M.S. Prabhu treats Amy Jackson's face like a landscape, lighting her with a soft, forgiving glow that contrasts sharply with the harsh fluorescent glare of the engineering offices where Sachin faces rejection after rejection. There is an unmistakable stiffness to the way the supporting cast delivers their Hindi dialogue, as if the lines were translated from a completely different script by someone who had never actually heard two people argue over a marriage proposal in a suburban kitchen.

The central conflict hinges on religious differences and familial duty, but the movie refuses to treat these obstacles with any real sociological weight. Sachin is Christian, Jessie is Hindu in the original version, but the swap to a Malayali Christian girl and a Hindu boy in this adaptation changes the texture of the family resistance into something far more familiar to mainstream Hindi cinema audiences used to crossing community lines with maximum emotional collateral. Yet the film struggles to make Jessie's hesitation convincing. She swings between passionate defiance and cold withdrawal so rapidly that you start to wonder if her character is being written by committee on a daily basis. Prateik Babbar tries to anchor this erratic behavior with a puppy-dog sincerity that sometimes works and sometimes just looks like someone who forgot his cue, dragging his feet through scenes where he is supposed to be broken by grief. Bollywood movies usually prefer their heroes either hyper-masculine or tragically noble, so seeing a lead character whine, obsess, and generally behave like an awkward pest is refreshing until the script starts rewarding him for it.

There is a recurring visual motif involving blue doors and wet asphalt that wears out its welcome long before the credits roll. Every time Sachin and Jessie need to have a serious conversation about their future, they find themselves standing in front of the exact same peeling paintwork while a disinterested stray dog wanders across the background of the shot. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how the continuity department couldn't even be bothered to move the dog between takes, leaving the same brindle-coloured animal pacing back and forth while actors weep about eternal devotion. Ramesh Sippy looks genuinely confused during his brief scene on the film set, delivering his lines with the casual detachment of a man who parked in the wrong lot and just wants to find his driver. Amy Jackson's performance improves marginally once the setting shifts to Kerala, where the muted greens and browns of the local architecture force her to ground her expressions in something resembling physical reality rather than magazine-cover poise. Still, the chemistry between the two leads remains stubbornly tepid, lacking the combustible friction that made Mani Ratnam's Bombay such a raw nerve of a viewing experience decades earlier.

The closing moments of the narrative abandon any pretense of realism and retreat into a hazy, self-referential meta-narrative about the pain of creation, leaving Sachin standing on a soundstage while a crew member casually sweeps up plastic debris behind him. It is an abrupt, unsatisfying exit that refuses to grant the audience the catharsis of a clean resolution, preferring instead to trail off into an ambiguous hum of machinery and muted chatter. The supporting players drift away without a proper goodbye, leaving Sachin alone with his screenplay and his memories of a rainy afternoon in Bandra that no one else seems to remember quite the same way.