Review: Delhii Heights
HOOK, LINE AND STINKER
Don’t be fooled by the cast – this relationship drama (or is it relationship comedy?) is as bad as it gets.
APR 1, 2007 - THERE’S only one person you can turn to after experiencing something like Delhii Heights, and that’s Annie Lennox. The futility of it all is enough to make you want to channel not just her song Why, but the howl that she puts into the singing as she makes this one word stretch across seventeen syllables. Wh-aa-aa-aa-aa-aa-aa-aa-aa-aa-yyy? The Pet Shop Boys perhaps offer a close-enough substitute, with What have I done to deserve this? Or if desi music is your thing, Anand Bakshi could be the one, having already articulated your thoughts as you leave the theatre: Yeh kya hua, kaise hua… kyon hua? At some point, I know I’ve got to stop diddling around and get down to writing an actual review, but let me have some fun first, please? I’ve had none in the past two-odd hours I’ve spent staring at Jimmy Shergill’s hair, its styling clearly inspired by a Lhasa apso after it wandered in the vicinity of an industrial blower. (First Sanjaya Malakar and the ponyhawk. Now this. Come on, pop culture – give us a break!) Shergill plays an advertising man, married to advertising woman Neha Dhupia. (If Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt made a sitcom about this couple, would it be called Ad About You?) She marches ahead while he sulks, whiskey in hand – and the ego problems begin before you can say Abhimaan.
Or maybe you should say Adam’s Rib, where Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn were both lawyers, on opposite sides of the same case. (Here, Shergill and Dhupia battle over the same celebrity spokesperson, played by Surprise Guest Star with the kind of faint-rotten-smell expression we often have when our parents bully us into attending weddings we don’t want to. Clearly, the producers asked him, and he couldn’t say no.) Or maybe you should say Swarg Narak, where one couple had a perfectly decent marriage and ruined it with negativity, while the other couple – the wimpy wife and the womanising husband – saved their on-their-rocks union with a positive attitude. (This other couple is played by Rohit Roy and Simone Singh.) Or maybe you should say Jerry Maguire, where the hero came to his senses and proclaimed his love to the heroine in front of a group of irrelevant lookers-on. Or maybe you should say Silsila, where a man and a woman worked up a flirtatious storm during a Holi song sequence as their respective spouses watched on in embarrassment. Or maybe you should say Parineeta, which opened with such an evocative summary of the ethos of Kolkata, you found yourself salivating even if you couldn’t tell a puchka from a potato. (Delhii Heights attempts a similar paean to the glories of saddi Dilli, but I’m not sure “yahan Shanghai se bhi zyada chow mein banti hai� counts as a compliment.)
The director Anand Kumar has the oddest instincts. He sets up a big mushy speech, then ruins it with corporate-ese. And if you thought nothing kills romance more than references to “professionâ€? and “deadlines,â€? you haven’t seen (music director) Rabbi Shergill pop up beside our hero in his car to voice the latter’s thoughts. Nothing kills romance more than an out-of-nowhere Sardarji dressed in white, strumming a Spanish guitar as his lyrics appear as sub-titles. Shergill’s (Rabbi, not Jimmy) numbers are quite pleasant, but they’re wasted – one of them on a bunch of boys who are written into the film simply because they live in the same apartment complex as our leads. (But this tendency to focus on neighbours does result in the welcome inclusion of Om Puri, who plays a cliché – a Sardarji whose speech patterns reduce naaraaz and zaroor to n’raaz and z’roor – with endearing amounts of hamminess.) The director apparently thought he was simulating reality, for in a conversation that these boys have, a handheld camera starts to alternately pull away and poke into their faces. It isn’t enough that we get a general sense of the badness of their performances; we need to confirm it with tight close-ups. And along with the bad reaction shots and the bad staging, we suffer through bad symbolism too – when Shergill (Jimmy, not Rabbi) is on the road, and his decision to return to his wife is prompted by a traffic sign that says “No U-turnâ€?. And I thought: shouldn’t it actually say “U-turnâ€?, because “No U-turnâ€? means that he won’t turn back whereas what he executes after seeing the sign is… uh, a U-turn. I should have followed his example and done the same at the ticket counter.
Copyright ©2007 The New Sunday Express
hyuk hyk my opinion exactly
there were about 45 of our team watching this movie and let me tell you it was a masaccre out there ….people were screaming to be let out the theatre and i am talking about the strong ones ..the others had already given up with a prayer 
Somebody tell me what’s Jimmy Shergill doing in a movie like this ? I always thought he was supposed to be a fairly likable actor ..here he is anything but likable ..(and i don’t think it was intentional ) …..we took a chance on this because we assumed that just because the movie was called Delhi Heights ( and they certainly didnt let us forget it during the movie …with the number of times they repeated the title and kept displaying the name board ) it would have something to do with the city ( of which i have some very good memories having stayed there when i was kid )..unfortunately ….that didnt turn out to be the case. I would say Monsoon Wedding (which of course is in a whole different class altogethere ) or even Khosla Ka Ghosla are still the only few films which comes close to embodying the ethos of the city .We have had multiple films which had something or the other to do with Bombay ( mostly gangster movies of course ) and even Switzerland( thanks to Yash Chopra ) and now New York (thanks to Karan Johar ) have had better representation in the movies .(Chennai used to have Mani Ratnam bt that’s in the past ) ….As for me i am still waiting for the authentic Dilli Movie …
bala - try Ahista Ahista, with Abhay Deol and Soha Ali Khan. Save for the song placements, it’s a little gem of a movie based in Delhi.
well ..that was a movie i would have tried …except for the uniformly bad reviews i got from people ..boring was the best that they had to say about it ..but ill check it out just the same ….btw watch The Last king of scotland ….Whitaker is magnificent ….
I dont know about the film, but your review sure was funny. I feel terrible for having laughed so long and hard,…spent most of my growing years in the same classroom as Jimmy (Jasjit), I wish him well and I try to watch all his films. So unfortunate that he hasn’t quite made it yet. Guess this attempt is best forgotten.
“with endearing amounts of hamminess”
“Surprise Guest Star with the kind of faint-rotten-smell expression”
LOL … I like your reviews when the movies are really good or really bad. Thank god you don’t do the cinematography-was-good-music-was bad reviews.
Mickie - at least you can rest assured this can’t be blamed on the actors. I don’t think Aamir Khan could have saved it. Gaipajama - but what can I say?
I was honestly expecting this movie to be something different from the usual bollywood trash because:
a)it has Jimmy Shergill
b)Shivaji’s production company deciding to back a bollywood movie after ages
c)expected it to be something about Delhi
This would probably have been one of the movies I would have watched when they show it on TV but your review has totally thrown my expectations off-kilter…hmm..
->If Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt made a sitcom about this couple, would it be called Ad About You? 
LOL
Guess we’ll all havta wait for Rakesh Mehra’s Dilli-6 to see something on Delhi??!!
Would you be doing a review on Sivaji Music?
You didn’t get it dude. That was
No, you Turn (and go back)
padawan - yes. harman - aaaaarggghhhh!
bala says:
>As for me i am still waiting for
>the authentic Dilli Movie …
Have you seen Sai Paranjpe’s ‘Chasme
Buddoor’? Perfect movie based on
Delhi in the 70s. Very nostalgic!
yeskay ,yup of course i have
Farrokh and Deepti Naval are abt my fav combos ever 
…how could i forget that one 
….we even had a yezdi bike 
( was there a more perfect bike then ? 
I agree wholeheartedly.A ghostly sardar is laughable, a ghostly sardar with a guitar is well…That was the last straw, we ran away from the theater…Prabhu has too much money to throw around!
It appears like the screenplay and script writers pulled off half way thru this movie and the director had to do these 2 extra jobs, which anyway he didn’t have a clue of his main one.
The heights where he was standing was so heigh that in the end, this moview jumped all the floors of Delhi heights to hit the box office floors !!
Aishwarya Rai in Bikini…
I Googled for something completely different, but found your page…and have to say thanks. nice read….
Haven’t seen the film, but buy was that a fun Holi song or what — yet another memorable turn by Kailash Kher, and Sonu Kakkad was good here as well…
You mentioned Ahista Ahista upthread - have you reviewed that?