More metaphorical than’ real’, the conflict is between a girl who believes in grandeur, dance and monsoon drives, and a common man who strives to fit into her wonder world.
- Khalid Mohamed on RNBDJ
The above lines by KM sketches a lovely silhouette of the two main characters in the movie – Surinder Sahni and Taani. Read on to know more about these characters.
Jitters
Pre-release the movie gave jitters. This was a Yash Chopra movie and SRK was looking not even an average looking guy! Will the movie do that SRK magic? Will the Yashraj-SRK formula fail this time? In his quest to be simple will Aditya fail to enthrall?
<Post-Release
The movie failed to create Yashraj magic but Surinder Sahni won hearts towards the end.. Like Taani, we as audiences were also watching to see if SRK in this mundane avatar manages to create magic? And yes! He does... a remarkable job and has once again won hearts. This movie belongs to SRK all the way.. He has over shadowed the director by camouflaging flaws in direction, script and screenplay.
The movie does have few glitches which reflect Aditya’s failure as a director. The concept was the highlight of the movie... and this is the only area where Adi as a director charmed us.
The theme is to showcase that…
Love is not about the ‘outer being’ but its all about the ‘inner being’. It is about a girl’s dilemma of getting out of her fantasy world and embrace the reality. It is about feeling proud of what you are rather than trying to be someone else. But thanks to Shahrukh, not even for a single second, did our mind divert towards the flaws of the script and screenplay.
Meet Surendra Sahni aka Suri (Shahrukh Khan)
He is a bespectacled, below average looking employee of Punjab Electricity Board, reticent, boring, humdrum like the ones we come across while moving around on the city roads on bicycles and scooters. I believe that Suri is a kind of character who has been sketched keeping in mind the mundane people, doing mundane jobs whom we come across everyday in our lives but brush past them coz they are ordinary guys and not really tonics for our eyes!
A Yashraj character? Are you kidding? Well I am not. He is a product of YRF banner. We have seen romance taking a new form under the YRF flagship and have started associating him as the icon for romance. With the kind of characters YRF banner has churned out, this one character is trying to fight with all those characters....
An Ordinary man who nurses dreams of Extraordinary Love in his heart.
The movie is about his sweet quest for victory against larger than life characters..
Suri exhibits that love is love.. There is no need to impress in love. Love in itself is reason enough to feel glued to your better half. If love is real then you don’t need to do gimmicks to impress him or her. It is the modern world which has raised our expectations.. Just like we expect too much from life, we expect too much from love.. Love is not about expecting.. It is all about giving...
Meet Taani (Anushka Sharma)
She is vivacious and vibrant punjabi kudi who is married toSuri following some unfortunate events in in her life. She says she will never be able to love him because love has died in her heart. This is a movie about **dilemma of Taani’s heart to accept the reality which is not as rosy as the dream world.
Will she be able to reconcile with the terms of her heart and identify her heart’s true desire? Or will she be lost in her fantasy world which is indeed a never-finding land?
Taani’s character is interestingly developed and it was instrumental in bringing forth the vulnerability of Suri’s character.
Meet Raj (Shahrukh Khan)
He is a caricature of all the lover-boys Bollywood celluloid has given us till date in the form of Rajs, Rahuls, Prems and Rohits in general and the lover-boy image of SRK in particular. The character’s histrionics gives us a feel that dream world is artificial and looks charming only from a distance. If we look closely it loses its charm.
Adi managed to sketch this character quite well. However, by giving this character a far bigger screen space than Suri, he dappled the movie.
Meet Balvinder Singh aka Bobby (Vinay Pathak)
He is Suri’s friend who owns a beauty salon and he is instrumental in giving Suri a makeover. But there was no life in this character. Whenever he comes on the screen it appears that he is here to add comedy or to pose a question to Suri, the response to which would come out in the form of typical YRF dialogue. I feel a wastage of a great actor here. Again, director’s folly.
"Larger than life" vs "Lesser than life"
YRF camp is not associated with creating a plot which is real life. They have always created a fantasy world of love and romance for the audience who loved this kind of cinema. And here in this movie, they tried to do a complete volte face by creating a caricature of their own larger than life movies but unfortunately they missed out a bit on the execution part and prevented the movie from becoming an unforgettable one.
This is not a love story, drama, dream or reality. It was an attempt to portray real meaning of the word LOVE with the help of two main characters (Raj and Suri) who were symbolic to Dream World’ and ’Real World’ respectively.
These characters are well-developed. However, Aditya Chopra gave more prominence to the spoofing part of the movie (i.e. the character of Raj) and in the process forgot to emboss the romantic angle (between Suri & Taani).
A word for critiques
Critiques’ are expecting a YRF movie to be filled with real-life and believable concept and characters! How funny that is!!! YRF movies from the start has strived on churning out fantasy, fairy tale love stories which are far from real world. So why to beat the drum again and again for the known fact?
Why don’t they just digest that it’s an unrealistically real movie?
This movie is bit experimental in nature. Despite loopholes in the script, haphazard screenplay and disappointing direction at places, RNBDJ won hearts only and only because of strong characterization and brilliant performance by Shahrukh Khan!