Udta Punjab Revisited : An overhyped anthology tale which doesn't impress.
More than an hour into Abhishek Chaubey's Udta Punjab , a Bihari girl (Alia Bhatt) and a Jatt boy (Shahid Kapoor) cross paths. They're running from someone: perhaps from themselves, he suspects. Both of them are at the crossroads, in danger of being swept away. They break down and confide in each other as perfect strangers. There's a fear for everybody, and nobody, in their eyes. And then they're torn apart, but not before falling in love. Love, for them, at that moment, was just being able to be heard. It isn't romantic; it's desperate, and needed, and far from horrible. Even her hard kiss on his lips, an organic extension of her meltdown, is because "those monsters did everything but *this* to me." This line, in Bhatt's quivering voice, suggests the kind of 'ugliness' that no living mainstream actress would dare to embody. He then becomes the knight in shining armour who must rescue her from an evil tower. She has become his drug i