5 Weddings

Story: An American journalist travels to India where she overcomes her own misgivings about the culture, the people and discovers more than she had hoped to.

Review: Shanaya Singh (Nargis Fakhri) is not a fan of Indian weddings, India as a place or her father. But life deals her a difficult hand where she has to fly to Chandigarh to cover not one, but five weddings if she wants the top job at her fashion magazine. To add to her dilemma, her mother asks her to track her father, who left them when Shanaya was a little girl, and deliver a parcel to him. Like a good reporter and a dutiful daughter, she bites the bullet and flies to India where she bumps into Harbhajan Singh (Rajkummar Rao), a police officer assigned to liaison with her and stops her if she steps out of line and files a negative story. It may be tough to step out of line covering weddings for a fashion magazine, but Shanaya happens to chance upon the sorry way that transgender or Hijras are treated in India and decides to write a critical piece on it.

It would have worked out better had the filmmaker focused on one Indian wedding instead of five because the numbers don’t add a lot to the plot besides one or two incidents. Shanaya embeds herself very loosely with the weddings which make the story seems less believable. She is also not shown spending much time with the transgender community to get any credible story which she is shown writing.

The chemistry between Nargis and Rajkummar is unconvincing. While easily Rajkummar pulls off his role as a cop who is torn between his love and his work, Nargis doesn’t bring much to the table. The music is typical Punjabi pop mixed with some folk, but doesn’t add much value. The film tries to juggle the entertaining angle with a social cause which doesn’t work. With a guessable plot and a meandering story line, attending these '5 weddings' proves to be a daunting task.