The Great Indian Butterfly Review

It's hard to imagine why audiences would pay to watch a couple bicker for 2 hours. It's not novel, it's not happy, and it's not funny. The Great Indian Butterfly is a movie that aims to tell you where to find real happiness in life, but for the first two hours, aims to showcase the nuances of a marital fracas.

Krish (Aamir Bashir) and Meera (Sandhya Mridul) are this yuppie couple who have just missed their flight to their annual vacation, and so decide to drive down to Goa for their 1-week holiday. The first half-an-hour of their ride tells us how caught up both of them have been at their respective workplaces and how much of a well-deserved break from the rat race this whole vacation thing is supposed to be.

Now Krish has this ambition to find a mythical butterfly that promises to deliver peace and happiness, and while in Goa, the couple set out to find the Cardiguez Valley, the home of the fabled creature.

However, throughout the rest of the film, they continue to blow hot and cold, mostly thanks to the volatile Meera who can't seem to handle the pressures of work and the ripple effect that her office has on the rest of her life. She's insecure about her career, there's no intimacy between the couple, there's pressure from parents to have kids, and to tighten the knot of discord further, she suspects Krish of still carrying on with his ex-girlfriend Liza (Koel Purie).

You cannot fault the film for its realism of concept. The everydayness of the fights and the issues has been portrayed pretty well, even though the wickedness of Meera's office politics is caricaturish. However, despite the magical butterfly angle that hints at a fairy-tale wrap-up to the whole story, there's no element of fantasy or warmth in the movie. Like we said earlier, this film is all about a husband and a wife who are, most of the time, unable to sort things and be adult about their issues.

Then, even when the butterfly secret is finally revealed - with the film saying that happiness is right under your own nose, thereby enlightening the audience with an unprecedented level of wisdom - there's absolutely nothing to make you feel any better after having gone through a war zone for so long.

The dialogues are in English, and unfortunately the lines don't seem like real conversation - they just seem as contrived as they were being read out from an English textbook in a high-school play. The actors put in a good job, though. All the three - Aamir Bashir, Mridual and Purie - are spontaneous and energetic, making their characters completely believable.

It'd be nice to watch Sandhya Mridul do something less surly in the future, though. Her character, though real, is the single-most tiresome feature in the film, and if it means she's doing a great job, then it's actually backfiring.

Some arty background music and well-shot visuals keep this flick from being a complete downer. There are a few detailed smooches to complete the "marital" effect, too.

Watch this one only if you miss being depressed.