Hamari Adhuri Kahani is a film where three fine actors all play idiots, says Raja Sen.

Vidya Balan cries a lot throughout Hamari Adhuri Kahani.

Her character, Vasudha, is a timid and relatively mousy woman, one who has let herself be cowed down by patriarchy even when no patriarch is present in her life, and she frequently flies into panicked hysterics.

But the character and her motivations are not why I think Balan -- one of our finest actresses -- is crying.

I think she’s weeping her eyes out because, with every take, she realises how unforgivably atrocious this film is.

Mohit Suri has been an efficient director of plot-heavy cinema (with plots often filched from other places), a man who trades almost exclusively in weatherbeaten movie cliches but has always done so with some speed and slickness.

This time, working from a script written by Mahesh Bhatt, his focus appears to be not story but, simply, sadness.

Everyone in this film, in virtually every frame, looks pained.

The relentless background score swells to a crescendo, and then swells up again, to another crescendo.

The characters are all pathetic folk with twisted childhoods.

The word ‘mangalsutra’ is made massively heavy (while the word ‘terrorist’ is used with remarkable casualness) and there is much, much bad parenting on display.

Merely totting up many a sad element doesn’t create heartbreak, however, and grand tragedy cannot be stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster.

What we have here is Suri’s monstrosity.

Hari (Rajkumar Rao), an old, limping man, has vanished with his dead wife’s ashes.

He has left, in their place, a novel he has apparently written on the fly instead of a letter of explanation, and it is this that his long-neglected son reads and sobs over.

It is a novel, that, peculiarly enough, is not told from the narrator’s point of view and contains too little about himself, preferring instead to dwell on voyeuristic imaginings of what his wife Vasudha and her lover Aarav must have gotten up to.

Awkward.

The film is a dreadful drag, with godawful dialogue.

“Looks like you love your job,” Aarav says, played by a bored Emraan stating revelatory facts so often here that his name may well be Exposition Hashmi.

“How can you tell?”, Vasudha (rather needlessly) gasps, but despite lovin’ it, soon resignedly declares. “Mere ghar ka choola isi kaam se chalta hai.”

Okay then.

Aarav, a self-made billionaire with a truly miserable childhood, offers Vasudha a job in Dubai.

Vasudha, who has been lying to her young son about the father, Hari, that mysteriously deserted them five years ago, decides with much deliberation to take the job -- and promptly deserts said child instead of taking him along.

As for Hari, he may or may not be a terrorist, depending on what you want to believe about a story where trees double up as get-out-of-jail-free cards.

Also, Hari is the worst kind of misogynist, believing he owns Vasudha forever.

Vasudha… It is a name that unfailingly reminds me of Jaya Bhaduri in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s classic Chupke Chupke, where at some point while spelling out her name she is interrupted by her sister and called an ass.

Balan’s Vasudha is far more asinine, an apparently independent and well-educated woman who is aware of her husband’s appalling behaviour, is freshly disgusted and surprised by it each time.

When told he’s a terrorist, that seems to matter less to her than the fact that he hasn’t called.