Floundering along the way

Film: AnjaanaAnjaani

Starring: Priyanka Chopra, Ranbir Kapoor, Zayed Khan

Directed by: Siddharth Anand

Romantic comedy Anjaana Anjaani moves in so many directions, you wonder what happened to those good old films where boy met girl… and they lived happily ever laughter.

Laughter, there’s plenty of it in Anjaana Anjaani. Raucous laughter, bitter laughter, silly laughter, goofy laughter… The couple Akash and Kiara are portrayed more like two beer-swigging buddies on a road trip through the USA (shot with shimmering restlessness by Ravi Chandran) than lovers staring at the moon and dreaming of the ever-after.

This is that 1940s Bette Davis-Clark Gable genre where love emerges from the verbal skirmish between two people thrown together by fate. There isn’t much plot on horizontally at high speed on the side of a train, flying cars and bikes, corny but hilarious dialogues -- e.g. after grabbing and pointing scores of guns at the police, Rajni says “Happy Diwali” before firing a salvo of bullets; or when the robot is asked his address and gives his IP address! It’s not just god, the universe and its logic itself is recreated in the film.

Director Shankar who has a penchant for double image, multiple images and split images of his heroes returns this time with hundreds of images of Rajnikanth. The inspiration of Hollywood, display here. Once we know that the two suicidal protagonists are together for the rest of the movie, the only mystery that remains is why such vibrant lives would want out.

The drama of death as defined by the rituals of daily living are rather elaborately, sometimes engagingly, other times tediously, mapped in the plotline which is slimmer than Priyanka Chopra’s waistline. Regrettably the dialogues are not always as savvy, sassy and seductive as they ought to be.

Many times you feel the dialogues are translated from the English rather than conceived in the spoken language. Then there are the songs. Sigh. Tediously carpeting the soundtrack of the second more-pointless half, Vishal-Shekhar’s music just seems to create a dimension to divert our attention from the two belligerent characters played by two very engaging actors who quite often seem to be inventing pretexts for their characters beyond those provided by the plot, character and the lines they mouth.

Priyanka Chopra, incontestably the most complete and watchable most predominantly the Matrix trilogy (stunts are choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping of Matrix fame), The Mask, I Robot, and many Frankenstein movies are evident, but not overbearing.

Where Shankar scores is the ingenious conception of stunts. The allegedly ‘poorer’ cousin of Bollywood, the south Indian film industry, has been growing leaps and bounds in the special effects department. And with a little help from Hollywood, like in Robot, it soars.

Robot however, cannot boast of good music, so crucial for an Indian actress of her generation, makes you forget the film’s obvious blemishes, mainly lengthy self-indulgent passages of pedestrian passion-play written in a tone that attempts to be flip but fails to grip. With every film Priyanka grows in stature as an actor even when the space offered is meager as in Kaminey.

Given a wall-to-wall character to perform in this film, she has so much fun digging into the crevices of the person she is required to create, you end up watching only the character and the actress, in that order.

With perfect timing in the comic scenes, skillfully and subtly seductive in the film. A.R. Rahman’s decision to rely on robotic sounds, which we have heard close to three decades back in films like Robocop, fails to inspire. He could have at least conceptualised them more intelligently. bedroomy interludes and boisterous when in a drunken rage, Priyanka takes over the show from her first inebriated appearance on a bridge where she spots our hero while trying to jump to her death.

The Hindi dubbed version is saved by Swanand Kirkire’s translation that prevents the dialogues from becoming jarring like previous dubbings of South Indian films. Yet, he could not salvage the songs, whose gibberish lyrics are seemingly out of a time warp from films in the 1990s (remember the Prabhu Deva starrer Kadhalan again directed by Shankar with music composed by Rahman).

Aishwarya’s character is as conventional as expected. She’s the chaste love interest, the damsel in distress who has time and again to be saved from being raped, and who is nothing more than eye candy.

Two words begin with the letter ‘R’ and are synonymous: Religion and Rajnikanth. A third has now been added to cinema folklore, Robot. And with the largest number of prints ever for an Indian film and a global release, this sexagenarian actor might still enter world cinema folklore.

After all, Rajnikanth can make no mistakes.

Ranbir Kapoor in comparison is surprisingly subdued. It’s partly to do with the nature of his character (an arrogant misguided soul with little control over his ego). But you suspect Ranbir just decided to sportingly play the backseat boy this time because in Priyanka he had finally met his match on screen.

Zayed Khan as Priyanka’s heart breaker gets little space. But he makes sensitive use of the meager playing-time.

With more support from the dialogues and an elaborate supporting cast (largely stereotypes), the fine lead pair would have been better able to express their exceptional skills as actors.

Anjaana Anjaani is a film that sets off a tender saucy engaging trip. Somewhere, it loses its way, but still gets to its targeted destination because of the lead players who appear to know all the signposts and U-turns.

Subhash K. Jha

ARIES March 21st April 19th