Since, zillions of words have been written on ‘Cheeni Kum’ I will stay away from the trite by NOT starting the review by making it a romance between a 64 year old and 34 year old.
This is my way of putting it – A romance which started with a ‘sweet’ Hyderabadi Zafrani Pulav’, prospered through an unreturned ‘umbrella’.
Buddhadev Gupta(Amitabh Bachchan) is the owner of Spice6, the ‘finest’ Indian restaurant in London. The 64 year old takes pride in overseeing the kitchen himself as the chef. His is a strict disciplinarian known for his sarcasm. Neena(Tabu), a 34 year old software engineer is on a holiday visit to London. They fall in love(I am not giving away the details to keep the readers guessing!). When I tell you Buddha’s mother and Neena’s father form the part of the story, then if you are a typical bollywood follower you could guess much of what to follow.
The first half of this film, directed by R Balakrishnan is rather well spent with articulate introductions of characters giving the viewer an idea about their personalities. A quick-witted and jovial 85 year old mother of Buddha(Zohra Sehgal), a 6 year old ‘Sexy’ who acts as an adult(Swini Khara) and a few characters in the chef’s kitchen lit up the screen with some pithy one-liners and loaded dialogues that justify the U/A certification.
Chemistry between the lead pair works well. Tabu as gracious as ever with the maturity showing up and Amitabh doing his job as usual, ably aided by Zohra Sehgal.The dialogues are well written. Sreeram’s camera captures some of the unseen parts of London. Ilayaraja’s music is melodius; however felt that I have heard something very similar from him earlier. So far so good.
Now, as in any Indian cinema, after the couple fall in love(let’s forget the age difference for a while) they want to get married. And again as expected this is where the trouble begins. A self proclaimed ‘Gandhian’ – Neena’s father(Paresh Rawal) is NOT in agreement with the ‘affair’ that his daughter is having. From here onwards the film becomes a bit taxing. One-liners become too irritating at times, the father character doing some school boy dramas in the name of satyagraha and an absolute disaster scene at Qutub. Swini does a wonderful job as terminally ill ‘Sexy’, however I really didn’t like the idea of making a kid talking such heavy stuff.
Though the film handles a mature and probably uncommon theme, the script fails to develop the plot further. And I think it’s where *Cheeni Kum *fails. I expected a more sophisticated handling of the story line.
Having said this, Cheeni Kum is NOT a bad film. It’s marked by some good performances, some great scenes, some excellent one-liners and a different theme. However I guess the multi-plex going viewer would have been happy with a thickened plot that exploits the nuances of an age-no-bar romance.
Also keep an eye for numerous subtle promotional instances of various products – from sugar-free to cellular providers. This might be of interest to the MBAs among you.
By the way, what happened to the umbrella that acted as a catalyst to the romance?