The Telugu “comedy” (funny, how unfunny comedies can be at times) Darling brings a bad name to Telugu cinema and comedy films, in general. It is one of those films which must have seemed incorrigibly funny while it was being made.
Tragically the funniness evaporates in translation and what we have is Anees Bazmee on a bad-‘hear’ tone-deaf day or David Dhawan gone West.
There are no explanations for why the script thinks a suicide or a split-personality disorder is supposed to be funny. I mention these two psychological slurs as they crop up prominently in the plot to pulverize all sense of decency.
Early in the film Raghav (Priyadarshi Pulikonda) is seen attempting suicide. A tourist Anandi (Nabha Natesh) catches Raghav at it. When she hears Raghav’s past story about how he desperately wanted to marry a girl so he could avail of his coupon for a honeymoon in Paris and how the bride ditched him at the altar, Anandi is in splits.
We aren’t. In fact, we just want to split. Some perverse instinct keeps us watching this fly-by-fright comedy, so abstruse and idiotic, it qualifies as the biggest comedy misfire of the century.
It is hard to talk about what happens to the two above characters in the rest of the laugh-forsaken comedy. The two principal actors try hard to let us know how much fun they are having with the material. But it is a losing battle. Aswin Raam’s writing and direction are preposterously askew. We have seen better writing kills on Doordarshan serials fifty years ago.
The loopy delineation of a psychological disorder is only one of the things that is wrong here. Darling thinks a depressive condition is funny. It also thinks lengthy sequences showing the protagonist trying to make sense of his wife’s various personalities should elicit humour. This is the tone-deaf comedy of the ‘ear’.
Image Source: Instagram and Google