Film Review: DAYS OF TAFREE

‘Days of Tafree’ —  whatever that means —  uh, uh, it’s supposed to mean your ‘carefree’ days, is an official remake of the 2015 Gujarati film ‘Chello Divas’ (by the same director), alluding to your last day, or days, in college. As you may have guessed, it has at the core of its story (story?), seven juvenile students — Nikhil, Vicky, Suresh, Daljit, Isha, Pooja and Nisha — going through their college years.  Their excursions include everything but studies.

Set in Delhi (the original was set in Ahmedabad), the film opens with a trio of students with cigarettes glued to their lips (one could be forgiven for mistaking it as an adhesive ad). And when we are shown one of them being doled out two Rs.1K notes as pocket money for the day by his dad, we instinctively know how the film would usher us through the next elongated couple of hours and a half.
Their escapades include the entire class collectively banging their desks when the teacher’s back is turned, or flirting with the tuition teacher. One would think Archie comics were the inspiration behind director/writer Yagnik’s well-intentioned effort, but the film retrogrades towards the end with incessant bursts of monologues and some insipid sequences and sub-plots. One wonders whether the overwhelming jazzy background score was deliberate — to drown the banality of the film.  The acting is, at its best, average; Hetal Puniwala, who’d recently impressed as Parth Parikh in ‘Wrong Side Raju’ turning in an uninspired performance as the teacher.
It’s a never-ending film, and the film’s tagline ‘In class, Out of class’, could very well have been extended to ‘no class’.