Dev D (2009)

Once upon a time, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote a tale about an alcoholic lover, his married beloved, and a golden-hearted courtesan. This story was told onscreen several times, the last version by Sanjay Leela Bhansali surpassing the previous ones in its opulence and sophistication. And thus was it entrenched in public memory.

Until a strange fellow - with a familiarly handsome face and a famous surname but a career that couldn't have been less removed from either - decided to turn it upside down.

The discreet couplings and dazzling brocade were stripped away; the story relocated from Bengal to Punjab; the lover became a repulsive chauvinist and his woman a fiesty virago with occasional flashes of subservience towards him. The elegant courtesan was now a doyenne of phone sex with her past indiscretions recorded on MMS for the world to see. The victorias gave way to BMWs, and some coke 'n' hash was thrown in for good measure.

And thus did Abhay Deol recomission Devdas, steered by Anurag Kashyap through a tempest of sex, drugs and rock'n'roleplay.



The story begins with a brief look at childhood sweethearts Dev (Devender Singh Dhillon, or Dev D, played by Deol) and Paro aka Parminder (newcomer Mahi Gill) in Chandigarh. Even at that tender age, Paro shows she's no pushover, but a fiesty Punjabi kudi to the bone. She brings paranthas for Dev and then snaps at him when he asks her why she didn't bring pickle!

Cut to the present, with Dev and Paro now having a sexual relationship on the internet (as far as possible.) At his request, Paro even sends him a topless picture of herself. What's more, she takes it on film, and goes all the way to Delhi to have them developed. The only thing that annoys her about the gawking stares of the men at the studio is that they behave like they've never seen breasts. The only explanation for such boldness is that this is a woman who isn't merely aware of her sexuality, but revels in it - a far cry from Chattopadhyay's heroine.

When Dev comes back to Chandigarh for his brother's wedding, Paro is thrilled to see the man she wants to marry, but that does not stop him from having a fling with another young woman he meets at the wedding. However, when he hears that Paro is not a virgin, he calls her a slut - embodying the double standards employed by the average Indian male. (Kudos to Abhay and Anurag for unapologetically showing this fact!) They break up and Paro marries somebody else. Unable to handle this blow to his ego, Dev, who intermittently runs his father's factory but prefers to have run-ins with scotch instead, drinks himself senseless and is sent to Delhi to avoid embarrassing his family further.



Meanwhile, Delhi girl Lenny is now a high-class call girl who goes by the name of Chanda. We learn that she was abandoned by her parents at 17 after an MMS surfaces of her performing fellatio on her boyfriend, which leads to her father committing suicide. After spending some time in her grandmother's native village, she escapes to Delhi and is taken under the wing of a brothel owner after her former friends turn their backs on her. She slowly rebuilds her life with the help of Chunni the pimp, and even goes to school and college, moonlighting as a multilingual phone sex operator and servicing select clients. She meets Dev and slowly falls for him. In the meantime he tries to unsuccessfully get Paro to come back to him, but she turns him down. Unable to take it, he drinks to a point where he runs over a group of pedestrians in his BMW.

It seems like the end for Dev, but it is only the beginning. His dad dies fortituously at the time of the accident, and thus he gets a light sentence as it looks like he had been drunk out of grief; back in Delhi, through a series of providential escapes and support from a local mo-mo seller, he eventually reunites with Chanda and gets a chance to start over.


The movie drags a bit in the second half, and the events of the ending are a little too coincidental to be convincing, but the movie is a refreshingly different take on a classic love story. The complete reversal of the characters is much more believable and the film is visually arresting. The dark treatment with flashes of riotous colour makes for effective atmosphere and a special mention must be made of the camera movements in the drug scenes. There are plenty of laughs in places as well, which do not stick out as comic relief, but are actually part of the narrative.

Abhay Deol is the epitome of the male chauvinist pig and succeeds in evoking disgust, but little else. It is hard to feel sorry for his character, but given his penchant for such offbeat roles, he is definitely an actor to watch out for. As the concept of Dev D is his, he also deserves praise for coming up with a different twist on Devdas.

Mahi Gill shows plenty of spunk and talent as the fiesty Paro, and fellow debutant Kalki Koechlin is good as Lenny. While it remains to be seen whether there are takers for the latter's unusual looks, her linguistic skills will surely prove to be an asset.


Last but not the least, top props to Anurag Kashyap for breaking out of the mould for not being afraid to cast his leading man as a reviled cad and his female protagonists as strong characters who are more than just mere decorations, even when they are prostitutes. He does not hesitate to bring out the hypocrisy of the Indian patriarchal mindset, as shown by Dev D himself, who thinks nothing of having a sexual affair with another girl but calls Paro a slut when he hears that she might not be a virgin. It comes full circle when Chanda calls him out on his duplicity and brands him a slut, and he can't retaliate, for she is a prostitute - a person who is as publicly despised as she is secretly sought out.


A favourite scene of mine, in terms of content, is when Chanda tells Dev about her MMS scandal (which is inspired by a real-life MMS scandal in 2003, involving two fifteen-year-old students of DPS Delhi.) She tells him that though her name and face were never made public, everyone knew it was her and ridiculed her. There is only one way this was possible: everyone downloaded the MMS and saw it, including Lenny's own father. As she states in the film, "the whole country got off on that video, and I'M the slut." Here Anurag makes an excellent point about our society - it brands the participants of the act as sluts, but conveniently chooses to ignore that by having downloaded the MMS and watched it, it is just as guilty , dep perverted.

Their movies are not without it's flaws, but love them or hate them, in a world where most women characters continue to be merely decorative and 40-year-actors romp with 20-year-olds on-screen, directors like Kashyap are a breath of fresh air.

Review: Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008)

When asked whether his latest film, set in a village, would find any takers, veteran filmmaker Shyam Benegal replied, "There are always takers for my films."

And he was bang on target!

 

Welcome to Sajjanpur is a delightful comedy set in the fictitious hamlet of Sajjanpur, somewhere in the UP-Bihar belt. The protagonist, Mahadev (Shreyas Talpade in his element) is one of the few people in the village who is educated, and thus makes a living writing letters on behalf of the village folk – though he dreams to be a best-selling novelist. The villagers are all fantastic characters, each one more engaging than the next: a snake charmer who manages to lose his father in the Kumbh Mela; a corrupt local politician who wants to be sarpanch; a pretty potter Kamala (Amrita Rao) who is Mahadev's childhood sweetheart; an ex-Army jawan and his widowed daughter-in-law who is fancied by the village compounder; Munnibhai the eunuch who also wants to be elected as the sarpanch; and a perpetually weepy Ila Arun who is worried about her educated daughter's marriage, because the fiesty girl is a maanglik (born under the influence of Mars) and therefore unlucky!

The film follows the daily lives of Mahadev and the villagers, all leading up to a surprising end. The characters are refreshingly innocent, even when they do things that would be considered wrong – a hallmark of masters like Benegal, whose characters always have shades of grey. Even as Mahadev fancies the much-married Kamala and jealously writes angry letters to her absentee husband accusing him of being neglectful, his intentions are not anything like those of the adulterous characters in Bollywood films like Race. It's mere puppy love, and therefore rather endearing.

(Benegal isn't shy of taking a stab at current issues either – one of the politicians forces Mahadev to write a letter accusing one of their Muslim residents of being an ISI agent. The poor man turns out to be innocent, of course, much to Mahadev's consternation.)

 

The dialogues, which are spoken in the Bhojpuri dialect peculiar to that region, are also hilarious without trying too hard. An example is where Mahadev tells Kamala to bring him her husband's reply as soon as it arrives, and follows it up with a statement that she can visit him even when there is no reply! While this might sound leery in English, the actual lines were very funny. Terrific stuff.

 

However, the film falters a bit towards the end – after going great guns right from frame one, it suddenly seems to lose its punch. While I wouldn't call it a bad ending, the shift in the scene is a bit to sudden to round out the whole story properly. It's hard to appreciate since there seems to be not even a slight indication of the forthcoming twist, which does not do justice to the narrative.

 

But, despite the ending, there is no mistaking Benegal's genius at work. The comedic storyline is nicely interspersed with moments of poignance and tragedy, without them seeming out of place. This is one thing I like in particular – the dialogues are not deliberately funny, but are made so by the performances and the story. This is pure classic comedy, pioneered by the likes of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, and Benegal deserves to be lauded by successfully doing it old-school and coming up trumps.

 

Also noteworthy is that despite being set in a village, this film is not catered to a foreign audience. Far too many movies romanticize "rural" India and make a mockery out of the culture in an attempt to impress foreign audiences who like the "quaint" quality of such films. In Welcome to Sajjanpur, it is very easy for us to identify with the characters even though we may not understand the language or may be unfamiliar with the village setting. There is a little bit of each of us inside the people of Sajjanpur and Benegal has tapped into that perfectly.

The actors have done a brilliant job, especially Talpade and Ravi Kishen as the eunuch. Also, the songs in the film (yes, there are a couple of songs!) are so nicely woven with the narrative that they only add to the story. The songs featured are mainly about Mahadev's love for Kamala, and the visualisation pays homage to classic Hindi cinema, when songs were all about emotions and adding to the story, rather than mindless item numbers featuring garish costumes and foreign locales. There's even a tribute to Martin Scorcese's Aviator (or more accurately, that great Hollywood dream merchant Howard Hughes) where Mahadev and Kamala are in a plane - dressed uncannily like Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett, who played Hughes and Katharine Hepburn in the film!

 

Overall, this movie is a must-watch, and if you're a loyal fan of the genre of classy, clean comedies like Chashme Buddoor, Padosan and the like, then you'd better not miss it.

 

Back2Back Reviews: Om Shanti Om and Saawariya, Part 2

Whatever happened to Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s cinema, where every frame is one of breathtaking beauty? At first glance, it doesn’t seem so odd that Saawariya has neither the silk-and-brocade opulence of Devdas, nor the intense light and shadow of Black. But as the film progresses (all the while creaking at the joints) it starts to look as it everything has been washed out and replaced by dull blacks and greys. Splashes of colour here and there don’t help. The sets are beautiful, no doubt – but the colour palette of blacks and greys with a piping of blue and green, which can be beautiful otherwise, somehow fails to lend poetry to the film.

The set and the characters do not match at all, and it’s hard to appreciate a film when you cannot assign it a certain time frame. While that may be exactly what Bhansali intended, the tale of this nondescript town somewhere in India, whose cobbled bylanes, palatial homes and inhabitants are a curious hodge-podge of Victorian, Mughal and modern day suburbia, does not work. Even the time-period is divided between the 50s and the 21st century and some era in between. There is a street named after RK – obviously Raj Kapoor – and even the grey colour palette and costumes are reminiscent of Awaara and other RK hits.

(My biggest peeve with the film is the director trying to nail its association with Raj Kapoor with a mallet, but I’ll come to that later.)




The story is simple enough – boy comes to town and charms everyone, meets girl and falls in love, girl is engaged to someone else – and is narrated in flashback by a prostitute, Gulab (Rani Mukherjee.) But the protagonists, who are no more than puppets, fail to add anything to the already toy-like ambience. Ranbir Kapoor plays Raj, a wannabe singer who comes to this town and makes it his home; he wins the hearts of Gulab, the other prostitutes and his landlady (Zohra Sehgal) and gets a job singing at the local bar. There seems to be no convincing explanation for development of their interpersonal relationships except for Raj's winsome charm. Then Raj meets Sakina (Sonam Kapoor) and falls in love. Except that Sonam has already given her heart to the brooding, mysterious Imaan (Salman Khan, the only character in the film who seems to have a personality) and looks upon Raj as nothing but a friend. Ultimately, after a lot of cat-and-mouse, Imaan returns home, Sakina returns to him, and Raj goes back to his lonely life.


In addition to the jerky development of the relationships between the characters, the characters themselves are no fun to watch. Both Ranbir and Sonam seem merely two-dimensional. And here’s where I rant about the Raj Kapoor connection – why, why, why can’t Bhansali just stay off the fact that Ranbir Kapoor is a scion of India’s biggest acting dynasty? He’s winsome and talented enough, especially as a dancer, if only the director had just let him be. It’s hard to see Ranbir without comparing him to his father and grandfather, especially when his on-screen character is rather lifeless but tries hard to ape the on-screen Raj Kapoor in every way. His character’s name is Ranbir Raj (Raj Kapoor’s birth name), the street is named RK, he wears his grandfather’s signature bowler hat, his clothes are similar, there’s a scene with Sonam under an umbrella that’s reminiscent of Shree 420 … and as if that is not enough, there’s even a cringe-inducing scene where Ranbir screams his father Rishi Kapoor’s dialogue from Karz to the bar audience: “Tumne kabhi kisi se pyaar kiya?”

(And I would very much like to debate on whether Ranbir Kapoor’s towel-dropping scene was a nod to Mera Naam Joker where Simi Garewal’s character bares her derriere, but I think I’ll skip it.)



Sonam Kapoor as Sakina is suitably beautiful, but like Raj, lifeless. Her character’s bouncing back and forth from being all shy and blushing with Raj to being suddenly breathless and pining over Imaan is too unstable to induce any sympathy. Zohra Sehgal’s crisp theatre-trained British accent and acting experience seems to have gone waste, even though she makes a convincing Anglo-Indian. Rani Mukherjee as Gulab looks the part and shows some spark, but she seems to have been photoshopped in. Perhaps Bhansali was deliberately trying to paint the town chastely in black and white and the prostitutes in a riot of colours, but Gulab and her ilk do not seem to belong to the same time-period at all.

Salman Khan as Imaan, who rather resembles an exotic Tuareg tribesman, with his startling kohl-rimmed green eyes and bulky physique completely obscured in black, is the only one who perfectly matches the sets, melting in and out of the darkness. The rest of it – Mughal architecture, English-style bridge over the river, Kashmir-style canoes and the characters speaking in a modern mix of Hindi and English – just cannot seem to come together, though each element is individually beautiful.


But the film does have its moments. In some scenes, the dark ambience seems to work, and it definitely makes Sakina seem more luminous. Imaan's entry into Sakina's life one black night, as the brooding yet mesmerising stranger who speaks mostly in monosyllables, is well-done and goes with the dreamlike ambience of the town. Ranbir's towel-clad song, after his meeting Sakina for the first time, begins with him standing at the window with towel open and bare to the world, with almost white sunlight streaming in. This short scene is the only one in the entire film that occurs in the morning, and perhaps for that reason alone, seems so alive.

The soundtrack of this film is not really outstanding, but the title track Saawariya and Masha Allah are noteworthy.

The panoramic, dreamlike view of the town, especially in the opening scene and from the clock-tower, with a steam engine chugging away over a bridge, is reminiscent of the land of the Spirits in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Salman Khan said about the film in an interview that if one were to make an animated film, it wouldn’t be as beautiful. Ironically, this particular scene IS animated!

In the end, it’s just a tediously told film and not even as visually gorgeous as Bhansali’s earlier films. Even Black, which was mostly shadow, was spectacular both visually and in terms of acting. Once again, this debacle proves that a film needs genius, not genes, to make it work.

Back2Back Reviews: Om Shanti Om and Saawariya, Part 1

Another year has almost flown by and yet again two of the most hyped and expensive films of the year have fallen flat when it comes to being examples of good cinema. Although, much to the relief of director Farah Khan, Om Shanti Om is still a crowd-puller, while Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Saawariya seems to have melted into the dark, much like its protagonists.

But for a film to be a crowd-puller or a “good time-pass” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a well-done movie. And while Farah has done a good job of both spoofing and paying tribute to the 70s film industry in first half of OSO, it falls flat in the second half, relegated to being nothing more than a showcase of Bollywood’s biggest stars. The story becomes clichéd - the ubiquitous cine-maa spots her reincarnated, long-lost son, they find the villain and take revenge, and live happily ever after. Sometimes clichés do work, but not when the audience is subjected to it again and again! The film seems almost like a direct lift-off from Karz (and remember Kaho Naa... Pyaar Hai?) The only difference is that the protagonist is an actor, not a singer, and the film ends without hero having to win the girl’s hand.

In fact, Khan’s debut film Main Hoon Na was a much better film. The story flowed smoothly despite the masala and music.





OSO has the protagonist Om Prakash Makhija (Shah Rukh Khan), as a junior film artiste, whose mother Bela (Kirron Kher) was also in the same profession. Together with his best friend Pappu (Shreyas Talpade, whose talent merits a meatier role in a better film) he dreams of being a big star with big dialogues. But, as Pappu says, without a Khan or Kapoor to his name, Om cannot get anywhere. (A clever jab by Farah, here.)


Om is also infatuated with Bollywood superstar Shantipriya (Deepika Padukone, easily the best thing in the entire film) who looks like a stunning copy of yesteryear “dream girl” Hema Malini, complete with bouffant hair and electric smile. One day, on a set, Shantipriya refuses to shoot since she has not been paid. In comes good-looking producer Mukesh Mehra (Arjun Rampal), who convinces her to shoot. However, a fire on the sets, from which Shantipriya is supposed to be rescued by the hero, goes out of control. But the director (Satish Shah) refuses to cut for fear of escalating production costs, while everyone else either looks on or runs away, and finally Om rescues her without regard for his own safety. In a scenario that mirrors the romance between yesteryear superstars Nargis and Sunil Dutt, they both become fast friends.

From his talks with Shanti, Om is surprised to discover that, despite being such a popular and well-loved actress, she hates acting and is pining for love, but does not get too close to him despite his love for her. One day, she ignores him after a shot, and piqued, he follows her from a distance to a makeup room, where he listens and watches through a window. There, to his shock, he finds her meeting Mehra, to whom she has actually been married for two years, but cannot reveal so because no one would give a role to a married actress. All Shanti wants is to tell the world she is happily married to Mehra, but he will have none of it – all he cares about is his next project, a mega-budget film called Om Shanti Om that would collapse if news of Shanti’s marriage broke out. Then Shanti drops a bomb – she’s pregnant with Mehra’s child.

To her surprise, and to Om’s sorrow, Mehra seems delighted. Om walks away a dejected lover and throws himself back into his acting and tries to convince himself that he can find happiness in Shanti’s new-found bliss.


One night he is walking around the sets, when Mehra and Shanti drive up. He follows them out of curiosity, and Mehra takes Shanti inside a building to show her the opulent ballroom set that will be destroyed after a grand party to announce their marriage and pregnancy to the world. Then in a cruel twist, he tells Shanti that she shouldn’t have trusted him, and sets fire to the set – with her inside it. As he walks out, cold and detached, Om, who has been watching the scene with horror, tries to rescue her, but fails. Mehra's henchmen return to beat him up as well. Om is burnt but still manages to stay alive, but as he stumbles onto a road, he is fatally hit by a car – a car that belongs to Rajesh Kapoor, Bollywood’s biggest male superstar, who is rushing his wife to the hospital for the birth of their first child.


From here the reincarnation saga begins, and the film’s believability wanes. Kapoor names his son Om after the junior artiste whose death he had accidentally caused, and Om Kapoor (“Call me OK”) grows up to be an arrogant, spoiled Bollywood superstar brat who gets his way with scripts and films. But there are remnants of his past life – he has a pathological fear of fire, and nearly faints on a song-and-dance set which has pyrotechnics.

There is another problem - he is regularly pestered by the now-greying Bela, who insists that he is her long-lost son. (Another poke, this time at an incident in real life where a Hyderabadi woman insisted Shah Rukh was her long-lost son.) Of course, nobody believes her.


One day, Om goes for a shoot to a new place away from the city – a place, which, 30 years ago, was a grand film location, but which closed down and became abandoned – naturally, the same place where Om Prakash Makhija and Shanti worked and other yesteryear films were shot. It has been shut after what everyone thought was the unfortunate accidental death of Shanti. There, flashbacks follow quickly one after the other, and Om finally remembers who he was in his past life. He suddenly undergoes a change and becomes a humble, hardworking actor, and reunites with Bela and Pappu.

Meanwhile, Mukesh Mehra, now a Hollywood producer (“Call me Mike”) returns to India and re-enters Om’s life at his birthday party, in the midst of a thousand Bollywood stars. Om bristles on seeing him, and comes up with a plan to exact revenge on Mehra for Shanti’s murder. He convinces him to let him re-make Om Shanti Om, the expensive film that had been halted by Shanti’s pregnancy and which led to her murder.

Om and Pappu embark on a hunt to find the perfect replacement for Shanti. In walks Sandy (Deepika Padukone again, naturally), a bumbling, bubblegum-chewing fangirl from Bangalore who wants nothing more than to work with her idol, Om Kapoor. They also select another girl, Dolly, to play Shanti’s role in the film and use her to lure the lecherous Mehra into their plan. (Dolly’s mother Kamini is played by Bindu, who once again is a vampish older woman who cannot speak proper English. It’s as if Farah lifted her straight out of Main Hoon Na and placed her in this film!)


The plan goes smoothly in the beginning. Om and Pappu manage to freak Mukesh out by planting Sandy with ghost make-up in a place where he expects to find Dolly alone, placing her shots in the reels of OSO, and finally at the grand premiere of the film, where Om even recreates that night when Shanti was murdered, much to Mehra’s consternation.

However, Mehra is not so easily fooled – he has already discovered that the reel has been duplicated and that a very real Shanti is seen on the film, giving him doubts about her phantom-ness. Sandy again slips up when she drops a mask at the party, and in trying to get away, scratches herself against a candlestand.


A furious Mukesh calls the bluff on Om, and knowing his fear of fire, sets fire to the set. Meanwhile, Sandy is once again dressed as Shanti on the night of her death, and goes off to scare Mehra, but it is only after she leaves the makeup room that Pappu finds out that Mehra knows the truth. It’s too late to call her back, and Sandy appears in the midst of Mehra and Om as planned.

Or does she?

Turns out, it’s not Sandy – who’s actually far from the scene - but Shanti herself, or rather, her ghost. She tells the truth, to Mehra’s and Om’s shock – she was still alive, but Mehra returned and killed her. So Mukesh, faced with this blast from the past, dies a horrible death under the weight of the glass chandelier – the same spot where he killed Shanti. Om gets over his fear of fire, justice is served and everyone lives happily ever after (though Om and Sandy, thankfully, do not hook up.)


OSO gets flawed in the second half when Om’s remembrance of his past life is done away too soon, The fear of fire seems like a good start, but the faint “Om” mark on Om’s wrist is a bit forced. The unraveling of Om’s past life could have proceeded more believably, considering reincarnation is already something unbelievable! His reunion with Bela and Pappu too happens in rushed manner, as if to make space for that “mother of all item numbers” in which several Bollywood stars make a special appearance at Om’s birthday party. Perhaps the director wanted to finish the film as soon as possible, knowing that there isn’t much substance left!

To be frank, the item number by itself is quite enjoyable despite the bad music and silly lyrics, only because it’s a sort of nostalgia trip for 80s babies like me who watched people like Kajol, Rani Mukherjee, Urmila Matondkar, Juhi Chawla and Karisma Kapoor over so many years and in so many films. Their transition on-screen is so well-known to us that we can’t help but reminisce about their early days and films and how they’ve evolved since then (or disappeared altogether.)

The problem is that even though the stars are supposed to playing themselves, it’s completely out of place in THIS film. It’s as if Farah got bored of filming and said “Screw it, let’s have a big party!” The guest stars perform numbers very specific to them – Urmila Matondkar performs her Rangeela moves, Shilpa Shetty performs her moves from Khiladi (was that the film in which she made her debut? I can’t remember now) It gets even more complicated when Kajol and Shah Rukh perform the Kuch Kuch Hota Hai nose-touching gesture, because it was Shah Rukh, not Om Kapoor, who acted in that film! Finally, we even have three Khans – Saif, Salman, and Saif (with Aamir conspicuously missing) along with Sanjay Dutt, performing a bar dance. That’s a casting coup, right there. Farah needn’t even have made the rest of the film – releasing the item number itself in theatres would have raked in a lot of moolah!


Of course, OSO has its highlights too. It’s technically flawless, for one. The starting scene, where a white-clad Rishi Kapoor sings “Om Shanti Om” from Karz has been blended well with the scenes of the audience watching, though the addition of Farah herself and director Subhash Ghai looks too contrived. Was Farah trying to prove a point by deliberately inserting that scene from Karz, and naming her film after it, knowing the audience will instantly connect? Very clever move – unlike Ram Gopal Varma, who nearly committed blasphemy by remaking Sholay in the most miserable manner possible, she knows that we as a nation thrive on reminiscing, and so chose to make a film that is a tribute, spoof and remake all at the same time.

Also noteworthy is the song Dhoom Tana where Deepika Padukone’s scenes have been blended very well with songs from old films (except for some scenes where she performs alone.) The whole 70s look in the former half is quite authentic, thanks to Sabu Cyril.


In the latter half, the nostalgia trip works. The scene where Om receives a Filmfare awards is hilarious, with Abhishek Bachchan supposedly being a nominee for Dhoom 5 and Akshay Kumar a nominee for The Return of Khiladi! Even Rishi Kapoor and Rakesh Roshan do not spare themselves. It’s a refreshing change to see these stars poking fun at their own cinematic histories.

The song Main Agar Kahoon stands out from the rest of the soundtrack. Set to a waltz-y beat, it perfectly invokes a ballroom romance. Sonu Nigam is in his element.

But the one reason that makes OSO worth watching - the one thing that totally salvaged the film, for me - was the willowy, luminous Deepika Padukone. Irresistible smile, dancing dark eyes, and with a truckload of talent to match her looks, she easily outshines everyone else in the film, including King Khan himself. Whether it’s as the graceful Shanti, or the cute but clumsy Sandy, Deepika shows a refreshing versatility and potential. I look forward to seeing more of her in the future.