If you remember the seven minutes of Shefali Shah in Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya, you will remember also that she was the only beam of credible innocence in the film.
If you remember her in Meera Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, you will remember also that she was the luminous dark secret of the film, a girl suffocated with the enormity of her painful childhood till a moment pushes her to confront her abuser at a wedding, stop his car and create a spectacular, cathartic scene. No matter how many times you watch that film, that is the scene you wait for. Remember her in Aparna Sen’s 15 Park Avenue where she played Rahul Bose’s sensuous wife? In her national award winning turn in The Last Lear?
Go back in time and you will remember her as the wonderfully natural actor of television serials like Banegi Apni Baat and Adhikar. The woman who just has to look at a cemera to own it. In the opening scenes of Barnali Ray Shukla’s Kucch Luv Jaisaa, you see the glimpses of that Shefali Shah, that mercurial, unpredictable performer who can even talk to the phone as if it were a living thing and can ring many bells of memory within every woman who has spent a day or many in an oversized gown tripping over her children’s toys, talking to herself, feeling that the world has moved on and she has been left behind. So far so good.
Shah’s Madhu Sexena is a tired, undermined presence in her home and then decides to live her dreams on her birthday that her family is too busy to remember. It is at this point that things begin to unravel. When she is getting a make-over, we remember Sharmila Tagore in Griha Pravesh, casting off years of ennui at a beauty parlour while the song Pehchaan To Thi, Pehchaana Nahin, Maine Apne Aap Ko Jaana Nahin, plays in the background to tell us that it is not just the body that is being groomed but a woman’s essential self.
Here we see Shah draped in a figure hugging dress, sporting tinted and curled hair, walking on high heels, trying to smoke, buying a car and then walking into a sea facing restaurant for a sizzling brownie. We are with her till now but it is when she starts an inexplicable conversation with a stranger that we lose her and the film misplaces its plot. The man in question is Raghav (Rahul Bose), an escaped convict and the two somehow end up in her car where he plays the taciturn man of few words and she, a hyper excited child woman play acting before a mirror considering how little response she evokes in her companion for the day. We are also expected to believe that a woman who is the wife of a highly placed executive has never shopped in a super market and can get excited over packets of paalak arrayed in the vegetable section but let’s move on.
So the escaped housewife and the convict on the run have banal conversations, keep chasing a man who has nothing to do with anything, gaze at the sea where she drops her phone, finds it, drops it again and we presume finds it again, go to Haji Ali together and then end up at a lake side resort where some kind of bonding happens over a biryani burp, small talk about women’s liberation, a moving speech by her about just how her potential has been wasted in playing the house keeper and a housewife without a life of her own. We also catch Madhu watching what we presume is a pornographic film in the resort while Raghav is away. Subtext anyone? There is just a hint of sexual tension when shoulders brush, eyes meet and the air crackles and also a lovers fight which really is not a lovers fight but something about, “I trusted you and you used me and mummy, papa told me not to trust a stranger!” Oh well.
What prevails is a sense of exhaustion because the script is just woven around Shefali’s monologues, her shrugs, her chattering eyes and even someone of Makrand Deshpande’s stature is just there to play a cameo. Sumeet Raghavan who plays her husband spends most of the time on the phone and only Om Puri breaks out of the uninspired script to sound like a father who really wants her daughter to find her sense of self. None of the other actors register. Neetu Chandra only pouts and poses without anything else to do. Bose keeps his eyes half-closed as if trying to block out the boredom and has just one memorable line,“Sunaate Sab Hai..Saamjhta Koi Nahin.”
The end comes not too soon after we have driven around Mumbai to hear the word “pyar” and “dost” being implied and said respectively. The neglected housewife of yore then decides to stun her by now panicking husband with another “hot” makeover, has a ‘profound’ conversation with her daughter about love and sex and how the two are different things and Raghav, transformed by Kucch Luv Jaisaa also decides to turn a new leaf. How? You will figure that one out when you watch the film.
The question that I picked at apart from my unappetising nachos was this, “what is the film trying to say?” The answer to that could be, it is never too late to revive a tired marriage by keeping a few secrets from your husband, buying new clothes and finding a day to live whimsically. Fair enough. But the treatment of the premise does not engage your heart or mind or senses and the uncomfortable feeling you walk out with is that the film was perhaps a vanity exercise for an actor who has felt left out from top notch commercial roles because she has been typecast as “serious.”
It was just a bit disappointing to see a fantastic talent like Shefali hogging every frame and failing to create any lingering memory especially when she has never needed excessive screen time or high heels or fitted dresses or custom designed roles to be memorable.
Reema Moudgil is the author of Perfect Eight. (http://www.flipkart.com/perfect-eight-reema-moudgil-book-9380032870) . More on Story Wallahs. Other books by Unboxed Writers in our Store