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Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd.
Movie Review

Synopsis -  Couple 1: Oscar Fernandez (Boman Irani) and Nahid (Shabana Azmi)
They are an elderly couple; a bit out of place in this group of young honeymooners. The carefree twosome doesn’t care about people poking fun at them. They are on honeymoon to keep their difficult past behind and search for a new future with each other.

Couple 2: Partho Sen (Kay Kay Menon) and Milly Sen (Raima Sen)
This couple from suburban Kolkata is engaged in an eternal war of the sexes. A dominating Partho tries curbing his wife’s fun-loving instincts till things get shockingly out of control in Goa!

Couple 3: Pinky (Amisha Patel) and Vicky (Karan Khanna)
Pinky and Vicky, from Delhi, are poles apart. While Pinky is talkative to the hilt, Vicky is the quiet sort. The reason for his aloofness is manifest at the end.

Couple 4: Madhu (Sandhya Mridul) and Bunty (Vikram Chatwal)
This is a “crossover couple” with the husband being an affluent NRI from L.A., and the wife, a typical Mumbai girl. Seemingly, they’re well-matched – well, almost like girlfriends!

Couple 5: Aspi (Abhay Deol) and Zara (Minissha Lamba)
They are, supposedly, the “perfect” couple who’ve never had an argument. All the other couples comment, with envy, on their compatibility, but no one can guess their real secret!

Couple 6: Hitesh (Ranvir Shorey) and Shilpa (Dia Mirza)
This is a young couple from an orthodox Gujarati family. Shilpa is petrified of honeymooning but Hitesh assures her that she will return with a smile on her face – words that will prove uncannily ironic in retrospect!

With an enthralling score by Vishal-Shekhar, “Honeymoon Travels” is a young, new-age and hilarious meditation on marriage and the most shocking and unexpected surprises that come with it. Not to be missed!

Storyline

Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd. is about six married couples on a package honeymoon to Goa. Exciting and cheerful, this vacation is a subsidized option for a lot of dreamers on the brink of their new life.

The film opens with six couples, a guide, a driver and a handyman riding in a bus from Bombay to Goa. The narrative humorously unfolds seven different stories that explore the nature of love and human relationships. Woven into the hectic four day honeymoon schedule is a radio show – “Pyaar Ke Lamhe”. The jockey plays the role of an omniscient narrator and discusses individual characters, revealing secrets about them and their past.

From the time the bus leaves Bombay, a man on a bike follows them all the way to Goa. We don’t know who this mystery man is. He is dressed in leather and a helmet throughout, until one day….

India Fm | Planet Bollywood | Rediff

India FM

Sometimes, small films [in terms of canvas, budget, cast] have a lot to say than supposedly big films. HONEYMOON TRAVELS PVT. LTD., directed by Reema Kagti, is one such film!

One might be tempted to ask: Can HONEYMOON TRAVELS PVT. LTD. be clubbed with films like DARNA MANA HAI, DARNA ZAROORI HAI and SALAAM-E-ISHQ? Sure, HONEYMOON TRAVELS PVT. LTD. talks of six couples and their individualistic stories, but each of them are woven in one thread. Let’s get one more thing right: This one’s not inspired by BOMBAY TO GOA either. The similarity ends when a bus-full of passengers embark on a journey to Goa.

HONEYMOON TRAVELS PVT. LTD. holds your interest at most times because of its unpredictable plotline. The stories seem straight out of life and the characters are identifiable. If you haven’t encountered people with similar traits, you may’ve heard of them from someone for sure.

HONEYMOON TRAVELS PVT. LTD. is Reema Kagti’s debut vehicle, but there’s clarity in her vision. It’s a difficult task to narrate six stories in 12 reels/2 hours and Kagti does it quite well. A few moments linger in your memory. Yet, there are times when you feel that the debutante could’ve given a truly satisfying culmination to a few stories.

 

In a nutshell, HONEYMOON TRAVELS PVT. LTD. is a notch above the commonplace. You don’t expect the moon when the lights are switched off and the reels unfold, but it does succeed in bringing a smile on your face when the lights are turned on after the end credits.

HONEYMOON TRAVELS PVT. LTD. is about six married couples on a package honeymoon to Goa. This vacation is a subsidized option for a lot of dreamers on the brink of their new life.

The film opens with six couples, a guide, a driver and a handyman riding in a bus from Mumbai to Goa. The narrative humorously unfolds different stories that explore the nature of love and human relationships. Woven into the hectic four-day honeymoon schedule is a radio show. The jockey plays the role of an omniscient narrator and discusses individual characters, revealing secrets about them and their past.

 From the time the bus leaves Mumbai, a man on a bike follows them all the way to Goa. This mystery man is dressed in leather and a helmet throughout, until one day…

Six stories. Twelve people. Varied emotions. That’s the apt way to describe HONEYMOON TRAVELS PVT. LTD. Let’s dissect the six couples one by one…

 


 Over and above these stories, there’s a story involving the bus driver and his nephew. The driver is a drug peddler and the nephew has to pay a price for it. So far, so good! But the subsequent romance between the nephew and a foreigner [who nurses him back to normalcy] is hard to digest.

Director Reema Kagti shows promise as a storyteller. She knows the grammar of film-making right and has handled a number of sequences smartly. But it’s the writing that could’ve been stronger. The sequence involving Shabana and the bus driver [Darshan Jariwala] in the end is brilliant, but the ending seems slightly abrupt. Vishal-Shekhar’s tunes are catchy and hit the right notes. ‘Sajnaji Vari Vari’, ‘Halke Halke’ and ‘Pyaar Ki Yeh Kahani’ are numbers that sync well with the narrative. The choreography of ‘Pyaar Ki Yeh Kahani’ [filmed on Abhay-Minissha] is splendid. Cinematography is arresting. Dialogues [Anurag Kashyap] are well-worded, especially the lines delivered by Shabana in the end.

The ones who leave an impression are [in this order] Shabana Azmi [superb], Kay Kay Menon [brilliant], Boman Irani [first-rate], Sandhya Mridul [excellent], Raima Sen [natural], Abhay Deol [admirable] and Minissha Lamba [likeable]. Amisha Patel does an average job, while Karan Khanna is nurturing into a fine actor. Vikram Chatwal is strictly okay. Ranveer Shorey is wasted. Dia [looks very pretty] and Arjun are also relegated to the backseat. Darshan Jariwala is up to the mark.

On the whole, HONEYMOON TRAVELS PVT. LTD. is a decent entertainer that has something worthwhile to say. At the box-office, this one’s for the multiplexes completely. Its business in Mumbai, Delhi and South should be the best!

3 out of 5

Source

Planet Bollywood

HONEYMOON TRAVELS PVT. LTD. : THE FEEL-GOOD FILM OF THE YEAR !

Finally ! After wading through the duds of 2007, this film is one I actually enjoyed watching. I had expected HTPL to be good, seeing that it came via young producers (Farhan & Zoya Akhtar) known for their different film treatments. And it is different, fun and quirky, weaving together the stories of 6 couples on their honeymoons on the same tourist bus.

There are old-timers Nahid & Oscar (Shabana & Irani) on their second marriages, reflective and forgiving of live. Then there's the Gujrati couple Hitesh and Shilpa (Ranvir and Diya) who can’t get anywhere near each other without scrabbling, the super-compatible Parsi couple Aspi and Zara (Abhay and Minissha), and the oddball NRI husband Bunty(Chatwal) with his desi, fun-loving wife Madhu (Mridul). Kaykay Menon plays an uptight and insecure Bengali man Partho very much in love with his beautiful, free-spirited wife Mili (Sen). And rounding off the sextet are the Kapoors, the Punjabi couple comprising of talkative Pinky (Patel) and contemplative Vicky (Khanna).

This is a fantastic cast everyone fits their characters right down to their accents do note Ranvir Shourie introducing himself as Hites and wife as Shilpa. The film starts off with the start of the bus journey, and Kagti throws us a couple of red herrings, like Shilpa crying her eyes out at going on the honeymoon. Then there’s a opinionated bus driver, and a mysterious motor-bike rider following the bus. And while everything looks lovey-dovey in the beginning, with familiarity and time, problems crop up. Kagti deals with each couple and their quirks without letting go of the momentum, and ties together each story nicely into the larger narrative.

This tale is firmly rooted in reality, in that it's finally about what one wants out of one-self, one's significant other, and life. However Kagti is not above taking forays into the fantastic, adding to the pep quotient, and giving us wonderful snippets like Pinky rising out of fur-lined clam-shells, and a demure wife beating the crap out of hoodlums while her husband watches open-mouthed. I was at times amused, at times surprised, at times moved, and at other times laughing my head off. All in all, I was thoroughly engrossed in these honeymoon's lives, feeling for them, and wishing them all happiness.

The sound track of this film is gorgeous. From the delicate Halke-halke (sung by Bombay Viking Neeraj Sridhar) to the foot-tapping Sajnaji, vocalized by Sunidhi Chauhan, the songs suit the mood and situations of the film. Direction is good, and the film veers from the beaten track in that it is not afraid to experiment and take chances. The script while banking upon that old adage Truth is stranger than fiction, mixes the real with the ludicrous and the funny, and doesn't hesitate to laugh at itself. Something which very Bollywood films do, and do well.

To sum up, this is a clean, fresh, and enjoyable film, moving away from the clichéd old Bollywood formula. If this is Kagti’s debut as full-fledged writer and director, I eagerly await her next offering.

7.5 out of 10

Source

Rediff

To recap, Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd is the story of six couples off to Goa on their honeymoon.

There's Oscar and Nahid (Boman Irani and Shabana Azmi), the senior citizens in the sextet, both married for the second time and the ones with the most gravitas. There's the Delhi couple of Pinky and Vicky (Amisha Patel and Karan Khanna) where she's the talkative North Indian girl who believes her life is a fairy tale while her husband harbours a secret that makes the trip a chore for him.

Partho and Milly (Kay Kay Menon and Raima Sen) are the Bengali couple where he is the tightly wound husband and she is his aching-to-be-free-spirited wife. Hitesh and Shilpa (Ranvir Shorey and Dia Mirza) are a couple from Surat, theirs is an arranged marriage and she will not let him get anywhere near her when they are alone.

Aspi and Zara (Abhay Deol and Minissha Lamba) are the unbelievably happy Parsi couple who have known each other 16 years and never had so much as a disagreement. And finally, there's Bunty and Madhu (Vikram Chatwal and Sandhya Mridul) playing the expat and his new bride -- the circumstances of their meeting and marrying are unconventional, to say the least, so naturally both have secrets from each other. Add to this the mysterious man on a motorcycle who is trailing the bus on its journey from Mumbai to Goa and this seems like a film with the promise of a lot of fun and entertainment, right?

Wrong.

This film must have looked way more appealing in the script than it ever manages to do during its entire running time. Most of the above-stated characteristics of the couples are pretty much the only characteristics exhibited during the entire film. No major character development is achieved that could help the audience fall in love with any of them.

The secrets, as and when they are revealed, do very little to further the plot or the action. Everything happens, nothing evolves. There is a fantasy element to one of the couple's stories that comes off as so far-fetched that it makes the whole exercise laughable rather than genuinely funny. With the marked exception of Kay Kay, none of the other cast members are playing against type and it shows in the fact that the audience will be left feeling like they've seen it all before, and done better.

The pacing of the film as well as the delivery of the multi-strand storyline seems to have been developed along the 'oh we haven't seen that couple in so many minutes so let's drop in one of their sequences here' line of reasoning. Even the setting, Goa, is made to look as unappealing as it did in Bride & Prejudice.

Beyond giving various characters phrases to define their ethnicity, little has been done to authentically place them in the skin of their characters. Neither Deol nor Lamba come off as Parsi, Patel does not feel Punjabi, neither Shorey nor Mirza are convincing as Gujaratis and the less said about Irani's senior Catholic citizen the better (in fact it would be wonderful to have to watch a film where the man is not required to emote in a bad wig).

As a debutante it must be wonderful for director Reema Kagti to have the backing of major industry players like Farhan Akhtar and Ritesh Sidhwani. Nothing about the film serves as proof of that faith.

The score by Vishal-Shekhar is forgettable, the surprise cameo is neither surprising nor welcome and the movie ends as it began.

1.5 out of 5

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