Romance
LILY BILY
CAST:
Jassita Gurung, Pradeep Khadka, Priyanka Karki, Anup Bikram Shahi
DIRECTION:
Milan Chams

 

When ‘Lily Bily’ reached its interval mark, I was the first one to barge out of the hall, in desperate need of fresh air. Not once in my movie-going life had I so strongly wanted the multiplex’s food counter to sell aspirins. I couldn’t walk out right away because I had to review the whole movie, not just the first half. I envied the five chatty teenagers who were seated next to me at the beginning of the movie because they had no such obligation. They quietly disappeared after the inter­val to maybe spend the rest of the day on something more exciting, given it was the Nepali New Year. As for me, I downed a strong cup of coffee to build my immunity for the second half.

 

With a title like Lily Bily, I think the makers aspired for a kind of romance between two star-crossed lovers, a la Romeo Juliet, Muna Madan or Laila Majnu. But the movie ends up as the romance between two utterly unlik­able and dimwitted protagonists: Shruti aka Lily (Jassita Gurung) and Avash aka Bily (Pradeep Khadka); a better title for the movie would have been Silly Silly.

 

The entire movie is a long flash­back that Shruti has inside the Jacobite steam train while travel­ing through the Scottish highlands. In this long flashback, there are multiple mini-flashbacks and voice-over monologues that make the movie an exercise in uninspired writing and boring filmmaking. Everyone involved in this movie, from its director Milan Chams to its leads, and to the person who com­posed the film’s background score, seemed clueless.

 

It starts off as a road trip movie: two people meeting after a long time. It shifts gear when the girl’s angry ex-boyfriend (Anup Bikram Shahi) makes an appear­ance and throws some kicks and punches at the hero. After that the ex-boyfriend vanishes. The story gets muddled when Shruti’s parents come into the picture along with her would-be fiancé (Sabin Shrestha) and whisk her away from Avash. Shruti then goes against the wishes of her family and pursues Avash, only to find that he has another woman in his life.

 

The plot is really disposable there­after and stops making sense, with subplots involving euthanasia and what not. Milan Chams, from what I’ve read, is a Nepali filmmaker with a strong footing among the NRNs in the UK. The only possible reason for him to make something like Lily Bily was to use his access to shoot a Nepali movie at a foreign location. So he’s attentive only in making good use of his camera while filming the song sequences.

 

A third of the movie has people either walking away from each other or running towards each other. And Chams feasts on these moments by shooting them in ultra-slow motion.

 

Pradeep Khadka, fresh out of Prem Geet, is bereft of any charisma. He’s paired with newcomer Jassita Gurung. Both act cutesy and funny but they are in fact childish puppy lovers, who indulge in banal conversation and fail to give us one memorable dialogue. They play protagonists in an Idiot Plot (a term coined by late film critic Roger Ebert), where the big misunderstanding could have been easily resolved if one character stepped up and spoke with clarity.

 

I went to the theater expecting Lily Bily to be a feel-good romance. I came out watching a feature length tourism video on Scotland.