Release date:
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June 12, 2015
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Director:
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Mohit Suri
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Cast:
Language:
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Vidya Balan, Emraan Hashmi,
Rajkummar Rao, Suhasini Mulay, Amala Akkineni, Prabal Panjabi, Namit Das, Madhurima
Tuli,
Sara
Khan
Hindi
|
This film should not be
called Hamari Adhuri Kahani (HAK). A far more appropriate title would
be Hamari Aadhi-Adhuri Khokli Film Ki Kahani.
To be fair, Mahesh
Bhatt’s story for HAK is not without
merit. In particular, the motivations of one character – the terror accused Hari
Prasad (played by Rajkummar Rao) – are fascinating, because the extent to which
humans will go to get revenge is always worth exploring. It is also worth
exploring, as HAK fleetingly does, the
motivations of women when they cover their bodies in numerous announcements of
their marital status (the mangalsutra/thaali maala, red bangles, sindoor, wedding ring, the works), take on their
husband’s surnames and carry babies through nine months of energy-sapping pregnancy
only to round it off with painful labour before blithely handing the child over
to be named after the father and socially be deemed his heir, not hers.
Neither of these is an
element to be ignored. Sadly, an outdated storytelling style, a surfeit of
cliches, an alarming degree of literalness in its metaphors (especially the
references to Radha-Krishna and Sita), some conflicted and laboured ‘feminism’ and
terrible dialogue writing end up ruining the potential of this Vidya
Balan-Emraan Hashmi-starrer.
Bhatt Senior’s basic
plotline is interesting, but he fleshes it out poorly. Given the story’s lack
of heft, director Mohit Suri’s deliberately languid pace becomes tedious early
on. Worse, writer Shagufta Rafique gives HAK
some of the most laughably bombastic dialogues to emerge from mainstream,
high-end Bollywood in a while. She is clearly aiming for an approach that was
popular in 1970s-80s Hindi cinema. Here’s the thing, Shagufta-ji… First, human
beings in the real world have never spoken that way, but we were willing to
indulge in a collective national suspension of disbelief for a while because it
was fun to do so. The fantasy that was enjoyable back then is not so much any
more though ’cos we’ve outgrown that era. If you do wish to revisit it, you
need the combined panache of writer Rajat Aroraa and director Milan Luthria who
pulled it off in Once Upon A Time In
Mumbaai (2010) and The Dirty Picture
(2011). Mohit and Shagufta, you have delivered some entertaining films together
in the past – 2011’s Murder 2, for
instance, was neat. But the dialogue-baazi
of HAK and its half-hearted direction
kill the film.
Why does a hard-as-nails,
apathetic police officer unexpectedly decide to help Vasudha Prasad (Vidya)
escape her husband so that she can be with Aarav? Kyunki yeh kaaynaath bhi sachche pyaar karne waalon ki madad karne ko
taiyyaar ho jaata hai (because all of Creation steps up to aid the cause of
true love), the gentleman in uniform explains.
Why is billionaire Aarav
Ruparel (Emraan) so in love with Vasudha? Because bahut saare patey thhey mere, par ghar tumne dilaaya (I had many
addresses, but you got me a home), he says.
Woven around such lines is
the sketchy tale of Vasudha, abandoned by her husband a year after marriage yet
clinging – literally – for dear life to her mangalsutra. Why? Because our
values are racing through our veins (i.e.
nass-nass mein), she says. Sad and pretty
Vasudha arranges flowers for a living in a luxury hotel where Aarav arrives as
a guest one day. After two meetings, much gazing and some borderline stalking, as
floral scents float through the air from Mumbai to Dubai, he develops behad ishq and mohabbat (boundless love) for her.
Aarav is a business
wizkid with his own dukhi bachpan ki kahaani. He also has a weird reason
(Oedipal, though unintentionally so, I suspect) for being drawn to Vasudha: she
reminds him of his mother. Combine his back story with her miserable present
and a contrived climax involving Bastar, and the result is HAK.
Vidya and Emraan have a flair
for bombast-by-design as you can see from their track record (he was in Once Upon A Time…, they co-starred in Dirty Picture). Here though they are
completely wasted, with little to do but pose around between those hackneyed
conversations and speeches.
The film has evident pretensions
to epic emotions, but extreme close-ups of the leads’ faces, her tears and her
curls cannot compensate for a weak story. In fact, Vishnu Rao’s long shots of some
attractive locations (an overhead view of Mumbai, a garden in Dubai, the sands
of the desert city) get tedious beyond a point in this soulless film. Rao shows
little imagination in capturing Bastar, though even his regular shots of a
spectacular locale are better than the glaringly fake computer imagery used to
conjure up a field of flowers in crucial scenes in rural Chhattisgarh.
Suhasini Mulay though
gets the worst of the cinematography: when her face is caught in tight
close-ups, she looks like a woman possessed by a spirit rather than an elderly
relative offering kindly advice to Vasudha. It’s nice to see Amala after so
many years in a Hindi film (as Aarav’s mother), but the stand-out member of the
supporting cast is Prabal Panjabi (playing Aarav’s employee Apurva) whose
inexplicable screen presence gives us one of HAK’s most unwittingly comical scenes: in which he declares his
friendship and (platonic?) love for Aarav.
As for the film’s seeming
‘liberalism’, the unspirited Vasudha dramatically transforms into a modern-day
Durga in a late scene with her husband to articulate some very valid thoughts
about a woman’s identity being inextricably linked to her husband’s, but the point
is entirely lost in the speechifying, the trite imagery of Durga’s idols passing
behind her just then (Vasudha is very conveniently in Kolkata at the time) and
the film’s completely contradictory stance until then.
No doubt women like Vasudha do exist – there is
nothing wrong in portraying this reality. The problem lies in the fact that the
film itself seems to endorse the
stupidity of such women, going by the symbolism of a naari as a man’s slave appearing repeatedly through the narrative
till then: Vasudha cleans her husband’s feet when he turns up at her house
after five years, a filthy, bedraggled creep demanding her affection and
loyalty; later she falls at Aarav’s feet on discovering that he intends to save
that same abusive husband.
Then of course there is
the not-so-minor point that early on in the film when Vasudha dashes off to
save Aarav from a fire in a hotel, he yells at the hotel’s security staff with
this spectacularly sexist line: ek aurat ko mujhe bachaana pada! A mere aurat! Imagine that!
Spectacularly
sexist and spectacularly boring – that’s a lethal combination. It hurts to see
Vidya in such a film.
Rating (out of five): *
CBFC Rating (India):
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U
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Running time:
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131 minutes
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