‘Intu Mintu Londonma’ is true to the spirit of the playground rhyme that inspired its title. The romantic drama basically imagines a make-believe childlike world and just like the rhyme, makes no sense at all. We get por­celains as protagonists in Ishan aka Intu and Meera aka Mintu, who mostly act cute and funny but their conversation is neither interesting nor memorable. Whatever they talk and emote, is so dull and irrel­evant that watching them is akin to spending time babysitting two annoying five-year-olds.

 

 

London-based Ishan (Dhiraj Magar) meets Meera (Samragyee RL Shah), the daughter of Nepal’s Ambassador to the UK, at a pub where he plays with his band and also works as a manager. After they are introduced by a common friend, Ishan casually points out to Meera that they have the same coat. Meera gets offended. Later when she sees Ishan put a Nepali topi on an ex-Gurkha patron, she smiles at him, hinting maybe she’s into nationalist dudes and not into someone who wants to elbow in by saying ‘same pinch’. I don’t know.

 

 

They meet again, this time on a train when Meera overhears some­one singing in Nepali. She follows the voice and finds Ishan. Their romance builds over a weekend of sanitized hiking and sightseeing. Next morning they go their sepa­rate ways. They lose contact only to meet yet again at a mutual friend’s wedding. The lapse in communica­tion in between their weekend trip and the friend’s wedding is never cleared. Nevertheless, they restart from where they had left.

 

 

Soon, Meera’s father (played by journo Dil Bhushan Pathak) gets wind of their closeness. He doesn’t approve of Ishan and to keep from things going south, abruptly announces Meera’s engagement to Major Akash (Saruk Tamrakar) of Nepal Army, son of a close family friend, and takes his daughter to Nepal. The rest of the film takes place in Nepal with the backdrop of Meera’s wedding, where she’s conflicted between choosing her own life partner or the one chosen by her family.

 

 

Seasoned choreographer Rene­sha Rai Bantawa, in what is her first directorial venture, outshines in production design and dance. There is too much opulence at offer. Characters are dressed like runway models and Sailendra D. Karki’s cinematography doesn’t shy away to capture the London’s postcard perfect locations. But as one tries to look at the film beyond its cosmetic glare, Rai’s direction falls flat. From her inability to make her young actors internalize their characters to mishandling of dra­matic scenes, she still has to evolve as a storyteller.

 

 

The central performances from newcomer Dhiraj Magar and Sam­ragyee RL Shah are poorer than the material at hand. Magar has that Joseph Gordon-Levitt boyishness about him but his pleasing looks is unable to cover up his lacklus­ter acting. His co-star, Shah, on the other hand, is six films older and still finding it hard to peel off her pin-up girl image. It’s time she overhauled her career graph and started looking for projects that would make her come out of the world of bubblegum romances. And Saruk Tamrakar, who makes an abrupt entry post-interval, maintains a stiff body posture to appear like an army man.

 

 

‘Intu Mintu Londonma’ is a close relative of ‘Kaira’ and ‘Lilly Billy’ that released earlier this year. These films might have been shot abroad and much care given to make their actors look pretty, yet the story engine is second-rate and rusty. Even with modest commer­cial success, if the Nepali main­stream romantic films keep deliv­ering such disappointments, the viewers would soon stop showing any interest in the genre.