After a long week at work and a good dinner of pasta and wine and dessert, I was exhausted. But most of my work is more or less mindless, tiring of the body and sapping of the soul, but hardly challenging for the mind. And, yes, for some strange reason, perhaps genetics, I happen to have one of those: a mind, that is. So even though my calf muscles were twitching (I wear heels to much, I am told, but refuse to accept it) and my shoulders were sagging and my eyes were feeling rather more bleary than they looked, I was wide awake and bored. Which invariably leads to consequences that should be avoided, but who thinks about these things before one does them?
No, I did not race down the highway at 150 kmph. Neither did I decide to polish of the bottle of plonk we had opened at dinner. And I did not do a mad nude dance in front of the open window either. What I did do, I regretted all yesterday, when I clomped around the house with a sore head, blurred vision, an aching neck and dark rings around my eyes that could have had geneticists testing me for raccoon DNA. I watched Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna on cable.
Big mistake. As I have said before, weep and this blogger weeps with you. And that is practically all that the actors did for the so-many hours that they were framed in all their glory by candy-floss director Karan Johar. There was Rani Mukherjee, who wept more than she smiled, the rest of the time looking grim and very unhappy about everything in her screen life. There was Shah Rukh Khan, who was nasty and curmudgeonly and looking and sounding very unhappy about everything in his screen life. There was Abhishek Bachchan, who actually wasn’t too dreadful, more because he had little to do except dance and maul Rani around and, in one not-bad scene, throw a wonderful tantrum where he got to break things, which he did very well. And there was Preity Zinta, who tried very hard, but was all that an actor of her experience and calibre should not be – wooden, artificial and self-conscious. Of course, there was Amitabh Bachchan, who was his usual fabulous self in parts, though for most other parts he should have been edited out. And there was Kirron Kher, who did not much, but wore the loveliest brocades.
Which sort of sums up the movie. Critics and KJo fans alike say that it was a radical departure from most of his sweetly romantic work, and that infidelity, divorce and mistakes are not usually shown so candidly in Bollywood productions. But it makes sense - to me, at least - that after so many years and so many films, some even original and not ‘inspired’, that filmmakers in this country should come up with themes and screenplays that actually reflect reality, even if they need to be packaged with frills, furbelows and lots of fluff. To show how two couples break up because one half of each is deeply unhappy and wants out, to show how those two unhappy halves come together and, after much weeping and melodrama, head off into the sunset (or to catch a train) is hardly brave; it is hat so old that one wonders whether it is back ‘in’ again, sort of like retro in fashion.
Did Johar really do something so novel and brave? I am not sure. But he certainly wrapped it all up very nicely in beautiful clothes, wonderful houses, superb photography and a city that will never lose its glamorous charm, no matter who does what to it on celluloid. I am not sure why I wept through it – yes, because everyone on screen was crying their hearts out, but perhaps more because it was such a waste of the time I should have spent reading the growing pile of books stacked in my bedroom, or out with friends or even asleep. I swore I would watch KANK, as it is pop-called, only on TV. Now I wonder why I did.
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