Cheeni Kum has been promoted as a sugar-free romance. It is that, and also weight-less and baggage-less and I mean that in a way that it willfully stays clear of any melodrama, at any stage of the film. You know a smart film when you see one; and this clearly is one. It is the work of an advertising copy veteran of 20 years bringing all his writing skills to the table and a 20yr old or older, passion to make films. It all culminates in this 2 hour something breezy sugar-free romance.
Cheeni Kum is a series of ‘dates’ between a man and woman for most of its first half. Hence all you’re getting, and taking without any complaints, are scene after scene of dialogues, mouthed by two actors whose acting skills need not to be elaborated at this point in time. They flirt with each other and with themselves, indulging themselves without shame or guilt for finally having found a match, after all these years, 34 for the woman and 64 for the man.
The supporting cast is as wonderful as the lead. More and more films today are paying as much attention to the supporting cast and their roles being integral to the film, as the lead cast. That essentially translates into more rounded and balanced stories, and a good director does that without taking anything away from the story or diluting it by adding too many sub-plots. Balki does that with the ease of having been at the top of a business which tells its story in 30 seconds flat.
The story is simple – boy, errr… uncle, meets girl, errr… woman – and they hit it off. At first they bite into each other’s Zaffrani Hyderabadi Pulavs(can anyone else say it like our buck-toothed MALAYALI fellow?) and then they take digs at each other, then throw flirtatious pick up lines and cues, and it all leads to an a-la DDLJ where the wannabe-groom crosses seas to ask for his bride’s hand from her father.
That’s where it gets slightly repetitive. Paresh Rawal drills and drills and drills into Amitabh’s face the ‘at their age’ dos and donts. Its enjoyable most of the times, but it feels like Balki is asking us to bear with him for a while until he figures out what it is that he wants to do next with his characters. We do bear with him, but it takes away from some credit from him as writer.
While Rawal pursues his Satyagraha, we come closer to the expected end of a wonderful supporting character in the film, Sexy. This little single digit aged girl gives us some moments where you can’t help go, ‘awww so cute’… it’s a different fact that I do not buy the relationship. We’ve had these characters in many movies, more so in ad films, injected to eject the exact same response that I mentioned above – but the gyaan coming from a girl the length of Amitabh’s arm is just not real in an otherwise realistic scenario. Ok, I agree, children see everything in black and whites, they don’t see the greys and it is the greys which complicate what is otherwise simple – good in theory, but we can’t buy this version of it.
However, Balki redeems himself right at the end when after a refreshingly new climax scene where Amitabh rants off line over line of deductive reasoning at a Gandhian Rawal, he goes back to the Ashoka Pillar to ask for Tabu, and gets her… And by this point, we too, like him, have forgotten about Sexy, ailing in the hospital. The scene where he gets a call from her father saying that she’s passed is so true-to-life. In pursuit of our happy-ness we usually forget what someone else might be going through. It’s why our lives are coloured and layered all the time, there are no straight blacks or whites. There is laughter after pain, sunshine after rain and vice versa… the only thing I wished in that scene was that Sexy’s father used her real name for once in the film. Why did I wish that? May be it would have brought me much closer to her in that single moment.
Amitabh Bachchan is an actor who was a superstar – superstars don’t do the kind of roles that Amitabh Bachchan does today, actors do. However, once again I didn’t really feel he was enjoying himself in the film, he was playing his role and playing it well, but only well enough. Wish we could see him enjoying his work a little more. Tabu enjoys herself in every scene with Amitabh. We can see it, and that is why she comes off as being extremely natural, and so casual, its almost like she doesn’t care – neither about him being 30 years older to her in the script, nor about she being in the frame and flirting vivaciously with the superstar BIG B. She is just herself. ‘Sexy’, Zohra Sehgal and the kitchen staff have been deployed most effectively to add some genuinely heart-touching moments and laughs to an already affable film – and the best part is, they’re all fun to watch.
Balki gets slightly single dimensional in writing as he deploys the same thinking styles to all his characters, Sexy, Tabu and Amitabh – all use deductive reasoning at different points in the film – you’re reminded in an otherwise well written script that it was one man penning the lines for all of them. 3 different characters talking the same language in the same style? Come on…
But never mind all that, Cheeni Kum is a film which takes romance to a new level, a romance without melodramatic overtones. Its beautifully subtle, we don’t have the characters trying to explain their stand points, so we don’t have them yelling out the WHY’s; they’re convinced of what they’re doing and they’re doing it… so we enjoy watching them in the HOW’s of what they’re doing. Joy ride… enjai!
- Kartick Sitaraman. 26th May, 2007