Farah shines in Parsi romance

When two Parsis fall in love, there’s bound to be friction. They are such a talkative community. At least that’s what we get to know from the eccentric bustle that our movies tend to create when dealing with the community.

While watching Bela Sehgal’s sweet tender story of Shrin and Farhad - past the age of marriage, determined to find love and companionship in each other’s unexciting company, one immediately thought of Basu Chatterjee’s Khatta Meetha and Vijaya Mehta’s Pestonjee. In the first, a widow and a widower from the Parsi community overcome their children’s opposition for an autumnal marriage.

The second was a remarkably accurate portrayal of the benign quirks of the Parsi community.

Though not a Parsi herself, Bela Sehgal plunges into the centre of the dwindling community’s eccentricities without trying to give the characters any kind of a novel existence beyond what they are stereotypically known for.

The love story of Shirin (Farah Khan in a remarkably poised debut) and Farhad (Boman Irani, as natural as ever) holds no surprises. They meet, they smirk, they walk hand-in-hand, he mistakes her invitation for coffee in her home for suggestion for sex. While she makes him coffee, he waits for her undressed. And you know the rest.

The portrayal of Farhad’s mother (Daisy Irani) and grandmother (Shammi) reveals the film’s writer Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s penchant for loud extroverted singing, dancing, chortling ageing woman characters, e.g Helen in Bhansali’s Khamoshi: The Musical and Kirron Kher in Devdas Beneath all the feminine giggles (bras and panties, hee hee) and male guffaws (tera rocket kab phutega?) that surround the theme of courtship between a middleaged couple for whom life is neither a picnic nor a funeral, Sehgal seeks out silent passages of undulating sensitivity.

Listen carefully. The film makes terrific use of silent moments that are becoming progressively rare in our cinema. Farah Khan is specially reticent, a mysterious smile hovering in her eyes constantly as though she knows that life, and life in the movies, is a secret joke. In her scenes with her comatose screen-dad, Farah’s eyes melt with affection. yup, she handles the emotional moments better than the comic. Boman seems to be reinedin. It’s like a new singer, say Shailendra Singh, when he had to sing duets with Lata Mangeshkar in Raj Kapoor’s Bobby. She had to hold back. Boman does that quite well to