Ordinary people do not interest Hindi cinema anymore and that is why even if Mani Ratnam’s artifice free protagonists from OK Kanmani (who did not think it was necessary to interrupt their love story to endorse Vero Moda, Coca Cola and Anita Dongre’s wedding wear) are channelled in Ok Jaanu (a Karan Johar production), they will be styled to perfection and will be curiously conversation challenged.
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The girl will also appear in a Gujarati hotel suite (that incidentally looks like a hashish fuelled pink fantasy) wearing a pair of mirror worked shorts and you won’t see much of her face but a lot of her legs. Not only that, she will screech this inanity about BV Doshi, a living legend of Indian architecture, “He is number one!” This, because Bollywood cannot think beyond numbers and the script translator from Tamil to Hindi did not possibly know much about Doshi’s contribution to the study and practice of modern yet rooted Indian architecture.
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The only swathes of real emotion appeared in the film when Naseeruddin Shah as a doting husband was seen struggling to cope with his wife’s fading selfhood. Whether he was washing dishes and asking that his sleeves be rolled up or drying his wife’s hair or breaking into a smile when she calls him by a familiar endearment, he made you realise that you were watching an actor who can infuse life and empathy even in a film that was otherwise a collage of multiple shots of the lead pair snuggling together with pop corn and designer pillows.
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Or maybe we are looking for intensity and realism in the wrong decade. Love today is not meant to be about the stuff of life. It is supposed to be a long series of goodbyes and hellos, vodka and coffee dates, pranks, bike and jeep rides on the edge of the ocean and general merriment.
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Okay Jaanu suffered from the malady of cosmetic inauthenticity that most Hindi films ail from today including Sanjay Gupta’s Kaabil. Gupta is known to give every film of his a certain varnish. If Jazbaa had a green haze, Kaabil has a soft focus perfection in the happier first half that even turns a casual moment on a beach into a picture postcard that the protagonists seem to be posing for. You can admire them from a distance but can’t relate to them because they are so perfect regardless of their visual impairment. If you were lucky enough to have seen a beach song (Tumhe ho na ho) from 1977’s Gharonda, you will remember how much fun, informality and casual romance was packed in the way Amol Palekar and Zarina Wahab revelled in each other’s presence. The camera watched their backs as they sat and talked on the same rocks that Yami and Hrithik pose against and you instantly know the difference between intimacy and posturing.
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Even the awkward moments between Kaabil’s couple are staged as when they try to dance together for the first time. Compare this choreographed elegance to Sai Paranjpye’s Sparsh where Anirudh (Naseeruddin Shah again) and Kavita (Shabana Azmi) go out for a meal for the first time and he knocks down a glass in uncharacteristic frustration because he is trying too hard and gets upset even further because she refuses to dance with him. Anirudh could not see and was no less “kaabil” than Hrithik Roshan’s Rohan but he had rough edges and vulnerability around a woman he had come to like a little too much. He does not talk about love when the moment to do so comes but instead about just how much he hates needing another human-being.
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But there is no such subtext in Roshan and Yami Gautam’s meet cute and they don’t just look like they have walked out of a fashion shoot, they say nothing to each other that stays in memory. Kaabil has its moments of tenderness but from a love story, it soon degenerates into a tacky revenge drama where rape is a plot device and while the wife’s violation must be avenged by the hero, an item song is inserted by the makers with lyrics that go, “Har din mujhko better lage…Tu ladki hai ya wine.” Because, you can demean women in the name of both honour and entertainment in one film and get away with it.
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