Laali Ki Shaadi Mein Laaddoo Deewana is insipid, terribly made, and yet a Warm Enterprise, feels Sreehari Nair.

Few people in the audience knew the exact movie title. By the end, fewer even cared.

I saw a lady walk out in the middle after hush-hushing to her friends that she had to feed her cat.

"Which cat?"

"Duh... Lucy???"

"Oh!"

There was a standing ovation of genuine relief by the time the film drew to a close.

Laali Ki Shaadi Mein Laaddoo Deewana (which, in its long-windedness, sounds like the title of a Charlie Kaufman-scripted Urdu picture), is less like a movie and more like one of those high school plays where real kids play Christmas Trees.

There were scenes where the audience laughed uncontrollably, as (up there on the screen) characters confessed genuine feelings, talked about their painful histories and flamed with anger.

Unintentional hilarity? Not quite.

This was sincerity hitting all the right laughter ducts.

The film is essentially one giant conceit (two lovers separate and they're adopted by parents of each other), played out for two plus hours.

It is the kind of plot line that sometimes gets fine actors excited.

And here, these actors arrive, one after the other, big grins and whoops abound, all slow-mo.

A revelation occurs, and the narrative shifts between a random present and an arbitrary past.

This is a movie world where things happen, only so that a flashback can be unfurled.

And so after Suhasini Mulay's character reinforces her royal status by referring to the Main Gate as 'Mukhya Dwaar,' we are taken through poor Laaddoo's story -- about how he came to know Laali, wooed her, impregnated her, left her, re-pursued her, and now stood there trying to deny her wedding-day happiness.

If at all his misdemeanours weren't reasons enough to shun him straight up, Vivaan Shah plays Laaddoo like a 12 year old on crystal meth.

In taking up this insipidly conceived role and playing it so obliquely, was Shah trying to do what artists of intelligence do in roles that can only be approached playfully?

Or, is this reviewer here, trying to mine out something that doesn't exist?

I leave it to the audience and the readers to make that judgment.

Writer-director Manish Harishankar, though, has no such apprehensions about who his leading man is.

The droopy-eyed Laaddoo gets all the ladies; damn, at one point, even his would-be mother-in-law stops to give him the eyes.

It's Laali, though, that Laaddoo wants to passionately torment.

Akshara Hassan plays Laali and in what is clearly not a wise career move: She dubs for herself.

The performers seem to be having a gala time hitting all the wrong notes and hitting it like teamwork -- it's as if they were pulling a fast one on the director who seemed over passionate and hence needed to be messed around with.

Darshan Jariwala sweats out his surprises.

Navni Parihar generously pauses between dialogues, waiting for her cue cards to change.

Kavitta Verma interrupts monologues to narrate her own sordid life story.

This happens more than once, and at one point Akshara Hassan's Laali cuts her off with a "Please don't irritate me."

Someone in the audience yelled out in response: "And us too!"

But then, between Gurmeet Choudhary who tries to win over a girl by talking to her about his pet horse and Kishori Shahane, who magically goes from being a suffering wife to an enthusiastic cheerleader, there's Saurabh Shukla.