Vivah
Cast: Shahid Kapoor, Amrita Rao, Seema Biswas, Anupam Kher, Alok Nath, Sameer Soni
Director: Sooraj R Barjatya
Who has lives like Prem and Poonam anymore? Rich biz boy Prem couldn’t bring himself to talk to a girl who used to sit ahead of him in class, he’s been abroad but is evidently a virgin, and it takes him half the running time of the movie to hold Poonam’s hand. Middle-class girl Poonam, seedhi saadi, acche sanskaronwali, is so well-bred that she can’t bring herself to talk to Prem at their engagement. Says she, all dulcet murmurs and downcast eyes: koi sawaal nahin hain. Who are these people?
Vivah’s single-track story moves from here till the wedding, taking nearly three hours.
Prem (Shahid) and Poonam (Amrita) progress from trysting shyly on the terrace, with a sleeping nephew for a chaperone, to exchanging sweet nothings on the phone (she being a good girl, will not possess cellphone, so will leap upon the old black instrument on her chachaji’s gaddi everytime he calls).
The acme of romance: she wrinkles and nose and says, zukhaam mein thanda jal nahin peete; he does ditto and clasps the mobile to his chest and goes back into his board meeting.
Sooraj R Barjatya is back to making the film he has always made, in which the hero and heroine are boy and girl (not man and woman), social and familial hierarchies flourish, everyone obeys their elders and betters, and is a card-carrying, religious-minded Hindu (just so we know that the filmmaker is liberal and inclusive, a D’Costa couple makes a nano-second appearance; we don’t see their faces, just their backs).
Right from Maine Pyar Kiya to the mega-successful Hum Aapke Hain Kaun to this (barring the disastrous Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon in which the director tried his hand at modern mush), the House Of Barjatyas has sold us the virtues of the undivided Hindu family which is as adept at using fancy laptops and jetting off to sign multi-crore deals with foreign buyers as keeping family retainers firmly in their place: all so antediluvian, so reassuring.
The mantle of the quintessential Sooraj Barjatya hero, essayed previously by Salman and Hrithik, falls upon Shahid’s shoulders in Vivah.
He’s a less pumped-up and less showy Prem than the other two, and does a good job.
Amrita fills out her job description prettily and nicely, though someone should have told her that false eyelashes look even more fake in close-up.
But they don’t share the sheer masti and the sexy undercurrents that Salman and Madhuri did, and Vivah pans out like a warmed-over cross between Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, and Hum Saath Saath Hain.
The line-up of fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers is made up of Barjatya familiars, and that’s where the performances are — Anupam Kher as the jovial-but-caring ladke ka pita who is willing to stand by his would-be daughter-in-law come what way, and Seema Biswas as the stony chachi who has a change of heart stand out.
Where do you go from here, Sooraj ji?
Deadline, Sirf 24 Ghante
Cast: Irrfan, Konkona Sensharma, Rajit Kapur, Sandhya Mridul
Director: Tanvir Ahmed
This one looks like a jumble of Hollywood stories: a little girl is kidnapped, and her father, a wealthy cardiac surgeon (Rajit) is given 24 hours to stump up the ransom, as her mother (Konkona) grows increasingly more helpless and hysterical.
This could have been a cracker of a movie, given the talent.
There’s Irrfan, lead kidnapper and terroriser. He invests his screen time with the kind of variety very few actors can, and there are times when you know he’s doing it on the fly, not on someone’s say so: he treads the fine line between an out-of-control kidnapper and a gawd-I-made-a-mistake regular joe with great skill.
Konkona, housewife and mother, brings alive a woman whose secure life crumbles in a flash: one moment she is scooping out ice-cream and calling out to her little girl, the next she is reduced to a trembling wreck. And Rajit and Sandhya make up a fine ensemble cast.
It is the director and the script-writer which let the cast down.
Tanvir Ahmed, who has made similar thriller-going-down-the-tube movies before, keeps his reputation intact, in the way he lets the story sag, and allows predictabilities to crop up.
Apna Sapna Money Money
Cast: Riteish Deshmukh, Shreyas Talpade, Celina Jaitley, Koena Mitra, Riya Sen, Jackie Shroff, Rajpal Yadav, Anupam Kher, Chunkey Pande, Suniel Shetty
Director: Sangeeth Sivan
Pachaas kaord ke heeray, a chase, a running series of lewd gags, and a cast of mismatched characters, Apna Sapna Money Money is a Cheap Comedy in the same mode as Sangeeth Sivan’s previous hit Kya Kool Hain Hum.
Among other things, Riteish gets into drag (a first ), Koena wears very little (again), and Celina dresses in even less (again, again ).
Shreyas , post Iqbal and Dor dives into his debut masala movie and proves he is at home here too.
Rajpal, who spoofs Amitabh’s act in Sarkar, is intermittently amusing. And Chunkey Pande, as an over-the-top Nepali, is a hoot.
But be warned, Apna Sapna... doesn’t deliver as much as it promises. It’s more funny ho-hum than funny ha ha.