Daawat-e-Ishq: A dawat you should definitely miss

Review of Daawat-e-Ishq: Go and enjoy a plate of biryani at a Hyderabadi joint near you, instead of qubooling this daawat.

Cast: Parineeti Chopra, Aditya Roy Kapoor, Anupam Kher

Director: Habib Faisal

Runtime: 125 Minutes

Hyderabad and Lucknow. What do these two cities have in common ? Well, apart from many other things, it’s food. Now, a story which moves between these two cities and has a tagline of a “mouth-watering love story” just fits the description, right? Only, Daawat-e-Ishq does Not.

The biggest flaw of the story is the way it has been captured. The Cinematography is just painstakingly boring even with a story concept as such. The Instagram food pictures on my profile look far better than how the mouth-watering dishes appear in the movie, that too when the hero (Aditya Roy Kapoor) runs a restaurant!!!

Definitely, the foodie in me was deeply hurt. As far as the story is concerned, it definitely tries to delve into the menace of Dowry. It tries to capture how even the padha-likha youth of our country still doesn’t see it as the evil that it is.

Conceptualization aside, there’s hardly anything that goes right for Dawat-e-Ishq. It makes you wonder, whether you are watching the unedited and still unpolished version of the movie.

Anupam Kher puts in a solid performance as Habibullah and that is probably the only character you’ll remember once this boring saga ends with another watched-it-thousand-times-before-and-got-bored climax.

Although a lot of detailing and effort has gone into using authentic dialects, be it hyedrabadi or lucknowi, supporting characters, location and food details, yet it all seems like a punishment when you have to pay to watch this.

This happens to be Parineeti’s worst performance to date, while for some strange reasons Aditya Roy Kapoor manages to make a little mark. Of course, giving those terrible song-and-dance routines would have been better. There are moments and typical Hyderabadi dialogues that do make you laugh, but unless you have an association with it, it won’t matter.

Daawat-e-Ishq is an opportunity gone wasted to highlight the terrible plight of the dowry system. What it does however is boring you out with something that is not even close to mediocre. Sadly, it doesn’t bring out the simplicity of Do dooni Char not catches up with the flamboyance of Ladies vs Ricki Behl by the same director, Habib Faisal.

I’m going with 1/5 for the movie. Go enjoy the biryani at a Hyderabadi joint near you, instead of qubooling this daawat.