The stars are dead. Tinsel town has lost its sheen. The light is dimmed. A Bigg Boss show sees more TRPs than a theatre release draws audiences. Where must the limelight now fall? On social media influencers, of course, flailing their arms and legs for a piece of your short-lived attention. Mindless entertainment is assured.
Enfant terrible Uorfi Javed is bold and singular. An internet sensation whose fashion is irreverent, tacky but unignorable. People do sit up and take notice, even if to censure. To borrow from a famous song, you can troll, you can hate but you can’t escape her looks. She stands out amid a pool of very forgettable social media influencers. A phenomenon that soared to heights thanks to the paparazzi and shutterbugs. From mobile phones to noodles, from human hair to garbage bags and razor blades, she can wear anything under the sun, she can make dresses out of anything unthinkable, even set her dress on fire with her in it. She garners claps and brickbats equally. Her outlandish ways have brought her more “haters” than followers, she says like a broken record in a new reality show on Prime Video. It is to some merit that she, a self-proclaimed wannabe Kim Kardashian, has landed an entire show to herself, like a Bollywood star who couldn’t leave a mark in films, say, a Malaika Arora or Gauahar Khan, in their respective reality shows with a similar format, Moving in With Malaika and Khan Sisters. Or even Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives and Bigg Boss.
Its biggest folly is to copy the show format from Keeping Up with the Kardashians. For someone whose calling card is in being original, howsoever bizarre, Uorfi’s nine-episode-long reality series, Follow Kar Lo Yaar, laced with unnecessary melodrama, and forced, scripted authenticity, is unoriginal, in both form and content, and, with all her screaming and shrieking and throwing her weight around, is quite a bore. This acting out one’s life for the camera or for an audience is itself divorced from reality. The play-acting is farce even if its subjects are real.
Follow Kar Lo Yaar Series Trailer
Follow Kar Lo Yaar Series Review
An entire show on a viral sensation… Exasperating. But why not? It is telling how digital creators are now brushing shoulders with A-listers of the entertainment industry. As a country, we are intrinsic haters, we love to hate on others. We are quick to pass judgements. The fact that this girl, who popped out of nowhere and made the world notice her, in her most unorthodox outfits, made with everything but cloth/fabric, whose trolls and admirers get into digital fist-fights, deserves a show that charts her unusual journey to fame. A rags-to-riches, coming-of-age story. A before-after/then-now story, tracing her roots and the life from Lucknow to Mumbai via Delhi. From nobody to being seen, her rise from being dismissed by the fashion industry to walking the ramp for top designers. But this is not that show.
The show devolves into a series of recurring conflicts and catfights, excessive spotlight on Uorfi’s sibling fights, with sisters Urusa, Asfi, and Dolly Javed, and arguments with her agency managers is alienating and rankling. Nine episodes too long, with no archival footage or even attempting to tell a story, making us rely solely on Uorfi’s own accounts, who could might as well be an unreliable narrator, the series is weighed down by subpar script, poor writing, making this docu-series a headless chicken running helter-skelter, all over the place.
Everything feels scripted, from her sister fights, to showing an uber-chill mom, who even adds fuel to the sisters’ fights, to Uorfi’s sessions with a therapist. Dedicating two episodes to getting implants, Botox and fillers, is overindulgence and imprudent. A sign of poor direction, as if director Sandeep Kukreja didn’t have enough material to begin with and hasn’t done much research on Uorfi, her background or journey, and just relied on what she said and what she wanted shown.
The show glosses over her struggles and initial opposition from family that made her run away from home, and eventual reconciliation. Did that come once she became rich and famous? To flesh out her dreams (be like Shah Rukh Khan and Kim Kardashian) and ambitions (beyond buying a Range Rover). What does she like, who is the person behind the façade? What are her DIY fashion techniques, how does she come up with the ideas for the costumes, what the process entails, how many people are involved, a behind-the-scenes of her costume’s making, and what statement is she making? Her desire to be an entrepreneur at all cost stays trapped in the meetings in her office. Her strained relations with her family are peppered with a shrieking Uorfi and are papered over with hair-cut outings, sharing drinks and laughter. Or holding iftar party back home. Everything is skin-deep, the writing is flaky.
Follow Kar Lo Yaar Series Review: What works
The episode with fashion designer Sandeep Khosla, one half of the duo Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla, offers an insight on why Khosla stood by Uorfi when the fashion world didn’t and what he does for her eventually.
Follow Kar Lo Yaar Series Review: What doesn’t work
The unending sibling fights. A squawking Uorfi. A pointless series.
The inclusion of the self-proclaimed “liver” Orry and rapper-comedian and Bigg Boss winner Munawar Faruqui and YouTuber-turned-actor Prajakta Koli, as prototypes who circumambulate around stardom/celebrityhood, like Uorfi, is interesting but besides pep talk by them to Uorfi, they add precious little.
The gravest injustice these OTTs do to the form of documentary storytelling is by commissioning such subpar series on celebrity cult figures who do not need any more popularity instead of opening up the space to accommodate real and good documentary films and filmmakers who stay in the shadows. Uorfi Javed’s backstory deserved a better writer and director.
Star Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
Follow Kar Lo Yaar is now streaming on Prime Video
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