It’s ironic how a film with an overarching title like ‘Katha Kathmandu’ turns out to be an anthology of loosely connected trivialities that is utterly unrepresentative of the spirit of Kathmandu. Author and TV producer Sangita Shrestha, who directs this film, tries to stitch together three stories with thematic fabrics of lust, love and life. But her lens is so shallow and detached from social consciousness that she ends up looking at Kathmandu and its people from a single dimension, inspired as she is, more by mainstream movies than real life.

These three stories feature a super-model (Priyanka Karki) exploited by her drug-dealer boyfriend (Pramod Agrahari), a teenage college romance between a college hottie (Sandhya KC) and a geek (Sanjog Koirala), and two terminally-ill heart patients (Prekshya Adhikari and Ayushman Joshi), who, at the cusp of death, don’t fail to cash in on little moments of joy.

All three are blends of broad-stroke characters and situations we’ve already seen in so many popular movies before. The darker side of the fashion world, filled with promiscuous models and lecherous men, made me feel as if I had walked into a Madhur Bhandarkar film. Also, the track of budding romance amid illness reeks of ‘The Fault in Our Stars’. Writer-director Shrestha never subverts these familiarities and plays them out predictably. She carries a very generalist assumption of drug addicts, making her actors rub their noses constantly. Other stereotypes are also played up. One character wears big frames and has a forced stammer just to look socially awkward and enough to make Rohit Mehra from ‘Koi Mil Gaya’ feel proud.

The film’s writing doesn’t do any favors to the actors. Characters are painted either black or white. Pramod Agrahari tears into his sadistic role with one-note intensity. Priyanka Karki is too zoned out in the role of a victim, who gets thrashed around by both Agrahari’s character and Sangita Shrestha’s conceited plot tricks, employed throughout to gain shock value. Shrestha fails to recognize that to land a good payoff you first need a good setup. The performances from young actors Sandhya KC, Sanjog Koirala, Ayushman Joshi and Prekshya Adhikari aren’t worthy enough to make viewers care about them.

At many points in ‘Katha Kathmandu’ characters will vent their anger at Kathmandu for crushing their dreams and thrusting their lives into a whirlwind of misery. These outbursts barely make us care about them or to relate their struggle to the contemporary mood and culture of modern Kathmandu. The film’s stilted in its glossy design and flat cinematic aesthetics. Lujaw Singh’s camerawork lacks the poignancy to capture the city’s texture. We stay mainly indoors: in brightly-lit clean apartments, expensive looking colleges and hospitals.

‘Katha Kathmandu’ has come one week after ‘Intu Mintu Londonma’, a film that also had a female director (Renesha Rai Bantawa). Although ‘Katha Kathmandu’ has slightly better performances, both films’ central shortcoming is the same: They are more produced than directed. They adhere strictly to the trendy filmmaking conventions. Money is poured to create lavish and rich looking production design, but what about the content? With their films, Rai and Shrestha have added no new dimension that could’ve questioned the status quo of Nepali films. Their initial efforts have turned out to be so bland that it will be difficult to keep a keen interest in what they have to offer in the coming days.