WHICH IS the greater of the two
emotions? Fear or love? One way of getting an answer is to spend three hours
and forty minutes watching Yash Chopra’s’`Mohabbatein’’directed by Aditya
Chopra.
The first couple of hours is lost
just establishing the characters ... a bit too many, one would think, You have
the strict disciplinarian principal of Gurukul, Narayan Shankar (Amitabh
Bachchan), who has never heard of something called a smile. Then you have three
young `boys’ Vicky (Yash Chopra’s son, Uday), Sameer ( Jugal
Hansraj) and Karan (Jimmy Shergill) who are most often busy pursuing girls
rather than studies.The skimpily clad girls include the spoiled brat Ishika
(Shilpa Shetty’s sibling Shamita), Sanjana (Kim Sharma)
and the war widow Kiran
(Preethi Jhangiani).
Then of course you have the violin
teacher Raj Aryan (Shah Rukh Khan) who is an antithesis of the principal,
especially when it comes to rules and regulations and a smile.
Narayan Shankar believes love leads to pain
and therefore weakness, and he hates weakness (a warped sense of logic?).Raj
thinks love will conquer all.He fell in love with Shankar’s daughter, Megha.But dad said ``no’’ and Megha said ``Goodbye’’ and jumped to her death! So Raj
is in Gurukul to teach Shankar a lesson or two about love! His
weapons? The three boys and their love affairs!
To begin with the film is too long.
Also the confrontations between Shankar and Raj are always interrupted by the
love stories of the teenyboppers. And as is the case most often, logic takes a
backseat. Anupam Kher and Archana Puran Singh are supposed to provide some
humour but all they manage to do is make you squirm and hold your forehead in
pain!
But the only redeeming factor is the
restrained performance by Amitabh Bachchan and as for shahrukh, he hams big time asusual.Even the music was not upto the mark only the two songs humko humise and aankhen khuli were good
All in all, a disappointment
from the man who made ``Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge’’