MAIN AURR MRS. KHANNA
The opening scenes of Prem Soni’s Main Aurr Mrs. Khanna promise an engaging, ever-so-different romantic melodrama. The marriage of Raina (Kareena Kapoor) and Sameer (Salman Khan) is falling apart — and not because of the stock-cliché reasons like infidelity. In this age of the economic downturn, a Bollywood hero, perhaps for the first time, declares that love alone cannot sustain a marriage, and that money is equally (if not more) important.
(Sameer has just been fired after single-handedly bankrupting a stock exchange company in Melbourne.) With a better actor, Sameer might have evolved into a genuinely complex character — a man who loves his woman, but who will not let that love come in the way of his survival — but even with the minimal shades that Salman imbues him with, there’s enough to suggest that, with this hero, this film isn’t going to be business as usual.
Sameer looks towards greener pastures — Singapore, specifically. The simple catch is that he wants to go alone.
Raina, therefore, suffers for her husband’s sins. There’s a refreshingly grownup gravity in Kareena in these stretches, where she’s torn between asserting herself and accepting her lot.
Sameer has rescued her from an orphanage, defied his parents and married her, so she doesn’t want to appear ungrateful — but she cannot see why Sameer won’t take her with him. These scenes are staged not elaborately but in a concise, cryptic manner, as if Soni were laying the groundwork for a monumental meditation on the modern-day marriage. We wait for these casual snapshots of Sameer and Raina to accrue into a warts-and-all wedding album.
And then Sohail Khan pees all over the wedding cake. Rarely has there been such a dreadful case of miscasting, and rarely has a film thundered off the rails with such a drastic change of mood and tone. As Akash, he is supposed to function first as shoulder (for Raina to cry on) and later as suitor (completing the inevitable love triangle) — but his scenes play out as if he were starring in a leering bedroom farce.
We’re treated to an endless parade of hot-cold emotional mashups. Even the so-called crisis — who will Raina choose: (a) the man who abandoned her, or (b) the man-child who saved her? — is a nobrainer.
You keep wishing for an option (c), where Raina dumps both these losers and waltzes off into a glorious sunset.
BLUE
During the opening credits of Anthony D’Souza’s snoozefest Blue, we’re plunged into a breathtaking Jacques Cousteau universe.
Even the names of cast and crew (in blue, naturally) appear with a phosphorescent twinkle, as if shaped by luminous creatures of the deep — and AR Rahman’s Rehnuma forms the perfect accompaniment, the easy-jazz arrangements just free-floating enough to suggest a lazy afternoon spent in the wake of glittering shoals of fish.
But a minute later, barely as we’ve sunk into our seats and begun to relax, the two-ton guitar licks kick in, James Bond-style, spiking us with the suggestion of adventure and intrigue lying ahead. We’re rudely yanked off to land, and what follows is the farthest thing from adventurous and intriguing — we’re asked to dive into the lives of the most boring characters, as they fill us in on their most banal backstories.
Going by the pre-release hype, Blue appeared to revolve around the excavation of a fabulous sunken treasure — but that development accounts for mere minutes of screen time, towards the end. The bulk of the film is ponderous buildup, about Aarav’s (Akshay Kumar, in unbearable cock-of-the-walk mode) attempts to conscript Sagar (Sanjay Dutt) into the treasure hunt.
Despite being strapped for cash, why won’t Sagar join Aarav? What’s the tension between Sagar and his brat-brother Sameer (Zayed Khan)? Where does the mysterious villain (Rahul Dev) fit in? Each of these questions is answered before we get to the good stuff, the underwater quest — and that essentially means we’re looking at one endless fuse sputtering away before the final bang. (Sorry, couldn’t resist the Diwali metaphor.) But then, other than the title, there’s very little colour in Blue. You see a film like Dr. No, set in the equally exotic Jamaica, and you take away the feel and flavour of the region, the strange and singular rhythms of a faraway paradise. With Blue, though, I cannot once recall hearing the sound of waves. Everything is drowned by the din of big-bucks Bollywood — the aggressive score, the money-shot mentality, and the big-name actors.
Even the descent to the ghost ship — skirting some of the most benign sharks ever committed to film — is unmemorable. I came away thinking that, in the ’80s, when Hindi cinema attempted similarly harebrained adventures like Samundar, there was at least the good sense (and, thankfully, the bad taste) to squeeze in an undersea catfight between Roshni and Poonam Dhillon, both in bikinis. It was completely gratuitous, of course, but did you catch anyone snoozing?
All the best
The comedies of Hrishikesh Mukherjee appear to hold some sort of talismanic sway over Rohit Shetty. Earlier, the director merely invoked a title (Golmaal). In All the Best, he incorporates entire clips from Chupke Chupke (Amitabh Bachchan explaining to a befuddled Dharmendra the mechanics of their place-switching) and Golmaal (Utpal Dutt ripping the moustache off Amol Palekar), suggesting that this film, too, has people switching places before fake identities are unmasked.
Depending on your tolerance for hit-or-miss comedies that include stretches of spoken Swahili (I kid you not), you might periodically crack a watery smile. But the only portions that made me laugh were those involving the gloriously demented Johny Lever , armed with the antics of the mute Sir Judah from Karz. Forget the others (Sanjay Dutt, Ajay Devgan, Fardeen Khan, Bipasha Basu, Mugdha Godse), Lever is the real star of this show. Why don’t we see more of him on screen these days?