Downward mobility is not what any girl would expect on the eve of turning 30. Dumped by her boyfriend, whom she expected to pop the crucial question, fired from her advertising job, and barraged with unwanted advices from her coterie of friends, the protagonist of Turning 30 steps into mid-life crisis; it’s an age where facial lines begin to show and the insecurity of being ‘jobless’ and ‘manless’ haunts any girl dreading the spinster tag and test tube babies.
In Turning 30, debutante director Alankrita Shrivastava deals us a chick flick that clicks for most of its first half, but eventually turns into a whine- and wine-fest involving the protagonist Naina (Gul Panag) and her bunch of friends - lesbians and cheating hubbies - with evidently affected manners.
You are all but amused at the misfortune and insecurities of Naina. Mid-way into the foreplay, her regular boyfriend Rishab (Siddharth Makkar) unceremoniously announces that he’s leaving her for another girl, younger and richer. At the office, her competitors nick her ideas and bag accolades. To cap it all, people around Naina can’t seem to tire of doling out advices about anything from lingerie to haircut, sex toys to even Naina’s sagging assets (by no means financial).
A little respite comes in the male shape of her ex flame Jai (Purab Kohli) whom Naina laps with open arms and uses no end as her ‘rebound sex toy’, as he puts it. But does she love him? Or is she still pining for Rishabh? Is turning 30, after all, really such a big deal?
The humour in the film stays strictly sophomoric, and indeed, the angst and anxiety of the film’s nerve-wrecked heroine begins to look bloated as she runs pillar to post, parlours to spas, not knowing what she wants. Sex? Love? Pedicure? Botox? A token boyfriend? A normal life? But then, what is normal?
In the end, a viewer comes out feeling that the film was just much ado about nothing. Gul Panag does salvage a lot with her spunky performance and Purab Kohli is reduced to a sorry figure. Siddharth Makkar brings a cocky, snobbish side to his character.
Narrated mostly in English, Turning 30 may have a farm fresh plot, but alas, it’s riddled with clichés you expect from any chick flick desperately trying to look mod.
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