|
Release date:
|
January 13, 2017
|
|
Director:
|
Shaad Ali
|
|
Cast:
Language:
|
Shraddha Kapoor, Aditya Roy Kapur, Leela
Samson, Naseeruddin Shah
Hindi
|
“Tumhare liye zyaada aham kya hai? Tumhara career ya Adi?” (What is more
important for you? Your career or Adi?)
Replace Adi with
Aidan, Aman, Anthony, Ahmad, Rustom, Gurvinder, Armaan or any of lakhs of
available male names, and what you have is a question women have been asked for
decades.
What do you want
more? Love or career? Marriage and children or that job? Because it has been
decreed by those who know what is best for us better than we do, that wombs are
incapacitated by ambition, and maternal instincts – a.k.a. every female human’s
bounden duty – drown in professional success. As is often the case in life, so
too in Ok Jaanu, the question is
asked by a well-meaning person.
Director
Shaad Ali’s Ok Jaanu is an official Hindi remake of Ali’s mentor Mani
Ratnam’s 2015 Tamil film O Kadhal Kanmani (Oh My Love, The Apple of My
Eye), otherwise known as OK Kanmani, starring Dulquer Salmaan and Nithya
Menen. Ratnam has produced the Bollywood version in partnership with Karan
Johar, and is credited with the story and screenplay here too.
Ali
has had experience adapting Ratnam’s work for a north Indian setting and
audience. He made his directorial debut in 2002 with Saathiya starring Rani
Mukerji and Vivek Oberoi. That film was a reworking of Ratnam’s Tamil Alaipayuthey
with Shalini and R. Madhavan. The retelling was lovely though not entirely as
magical as its forebear. In Ok Jaanu, there is no reworking, just a
scene-for-scene translation. And nothing is lost in the process except for the
earlier leading man’s electric charisma and the leading lady’s zest.
Is
that a good or bad thing? The answer depends on whether or not you loved OK
Kanmani.
Ok Jaanu stars
Shraddha Kapoor and Aditya Roy Kapur in the roles played in OK Kanmani by
Salmaan and Menen. She is an architect who wants to study in France, he is a
video game designer who wishes to work in the US. Tara and Adi meet by chance,
are drawn to each other and decide to move in together for the few months they
have in Mumbai before they go abroad.
(Spoiler alert)
“Is
this love?” she asks him towards the start. She stops him from answering and he
does not try further to respond at that point. Early on, they agree that
marriage and babies are not for them. But as expected, six months and much sex later, they
grow on each other and are confused.
The
thing with films like OK Kanmani from Kollywood and Befikre from
Bollywood is that they tell stories of young, urban, modern, liberal Indians
not as they are but as seen through an older person’s aspirationally liberal
gaze. OK Kanmani was steeped in wannabe coolth of the “please notice
that I’m showing a couple having sex and living with each other before
marriage” variety. Sadly, despite his relative youth, Ali has done nothing to
improve Ratnam’s tone.
So
yeah, Tara and Adi sleep together, live together and vow not to tie each other
down, but when it comes to the crunch, the only difference between this film
and almost every other such Hindi film romance featuring a commitment-phobic
lead couple is that it acknowledges and underlines the point that a woman need
not necessarily choose between career and marital commitment, if marriage is
indeed what she wants; that two people can follow their professional dreams and
still be together, that following each other to the ends of the earth could be
a metaphor rather than a literal geographical journey.
And
yeah, that’s a big small step, but how do Tara and Adi arrive at that change of
mind? What inspires her, a young woman wounded by her parents’ divorce and
custody battle, to soften up to the idea of marriage? Sure sure, she is in
love, but she was in love soon after they met anyway, so what gives her this
new confidence? What made Adi see life differently when just
minutes earlier he described her as “Tara, my biggest mistake”?
Who
knows? All we see are an actor and actress looking pretty, dressing prettily,
doing fun stuff while songs play incessantly in the background, and doing the kind of
things couples do in self-consciously ‘youth-oriented’ romances because they
look cute on screen but would merit a mega showdown in
real life (such as your boyfriend landing up inside – yes inside – your office,
skulking about in the shadows and whisking you off for a day in the sun).
The director is so
busy whipping up artificial energy in Tara and Adi’s relationship on screen,
that he forgets one thing: conversations and quiet companionship.
When do these
people talk seriously? When do they slow down from driving their jeep along a
beach or making out on a high-rise parapet or breaking into a restaurant
kitchen or taking food off a stranger’s table at a restaurant, to simply chat?
If it is Ali’s
contention that they get to know each other in the spaces in their lives that
we do not hear or see on screen, then the problem is this: as a viewer I wanted
to know them too, but I came away with a superficial understanding of who they
really are.
Ok Jaanu is interesting at first, but as it rolls along it
reveals its hollowness, a failing that even the lead couple’s charms and the
attractive production design cannot overcome.
Far more engaging
than the central relationship is the
bond between the elderly owners of the house they are living in, the
Alzheimer’s-ridden former singer and her caring husband played ever so sweetly
by Leela Samson (who was also in OK
Kanmani) and Naseeruddin Shah.
A.R.
Rahman’s music for this film is far from being his best. Sunn bhavara is
a pleasant melody, but the title track loses some of its appeal in the journey
from Kollywood to Bollywood. Even the remix of Humma humma – Rahman’s superhit from Ratnam’s 1995 Tamil
blockbuster Bombay – becomes too muted in the effort to
be different from the robust original.
Samson and Shah are
likeable as the older couple. Kapoor and Kapur are not in the league of Salmaan
and Menen, but they do share a nice chemistry that could be better exploited by
better writing. That said, the snazzy graphics accompanying the credits cannot
camouflage the fact that those credits give second billing to Ms Kapoor
although she is the bigger star.
Genuine liberalism
and attention to detail are clearly not this film’s strengths. For one, not a
single artist in a small supporting role leaves an impact. And that loud
cellphone conversation across a church aisle would have got Tara and Adi thrown
out of any real church in India. To know that though, perhaps you need to enter
one as part of your research. Just as you need to acquaint yourself better with
young people, enter their minds and understand their way of thinking, to
portray them on screen with any degree of depth. Ok Jaanu is a surface skimmer.
Rating
(out of five stars): **
|
CBFC Rating (India):
|
UA
|
|
Running time:
|
137 minutes
|
A
version of this review has been published on Firstpost:
Posters
courtesy:
Could u try to watch Kirik Party, the kannada film? The subtitles were really good. I dont understand Kannada yet loved the film.
ReplyDelete