This true story of a sparky dying girl, voiced in perky style from beyond the grave, is way too saccharine
Here’s a saccharine, smile-through-your-tears feelgood weepie from
India, partly shot in
London and quirkily narrated from the grave. It’s inspired by the life of an Indian teenager, Aisha Chaudhary, born with a rare immune deficiency disorder, and is a film that doesn’t invite you to shed a tear so much as hold a bucket full of chopped onions under your face until you can’t take it any more. I have to admit, it did the job on me. Reader, I sobbed.
Aisha’s perky voiceover (“By the way I’m dead, get over it”) is less irritating than the plinky plonky twee soundtrack. Speaking postmortem, she tells the story of how her parents – played by Bollywood stars Priyanka Chopra and Farhan Akhtar – met and fell in love in Delhi. They bring her as baby to Great Ormond Street hospital for a bone marrow transplant and settle in London. Here’s where I had my first wobble, when a radio station for London’s south Asian community puts out an appeal to raise £120,000 for little Aisha’s operation and the donations roll in, a fiver here, a couple of quid there.