Mirzya movie cast: Harshavardhan Kapoor, Saiyami Kher, Anuj Choudhry, Art Malik, Anjali Patil, KK Raina, Om Puri
Mirzya movie director: Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra
Mirzya has everything that’s required for a musical romance based on a popular Punjabi folktale: a pair of fresh faces ( Harshvardhan Kapoor and Saiyami Kher) with great Bollywood genes, a strong supporting cast, and lilting music.
Outside Punjab, the story of Mirza-Sahiba may not be as well-known as the other folktales about star-crossed young love such as Heer Ranjha and Sohni Mahiwal, but it has an equally strong core of emotion. And there’s no one better than Gulzar to be able to translate the story into a film, keeping the feelings and idiom intact. A touch of ‘Romeo-Juliet’ is stirred in to emphasise just how hard the lovers have to fight, and just how much our hearts have to go out to them.But right from the get-go, Mirzya tells us it’s going to be more about setting the scene, as it cross-cuts in time — some sequences are as spectacular as anything we’ve seen recently — than giving us characters that will instantly grab us, and keep us with them. This problem plagues this lush, good-looking production right through, and makes it much less of a film than it could have been.
Transplanting the tale to Rajasthan allows for locations that can take your breath away, despite their overuse in Bollywood. Grand forts, picturesque hamlets, glittering deserts and undulating dunes, and `rajwadaas’ with all their grand costumes and liveried retainers: Mirzya is all eye candy.