Some films are so well-intended your heart breaks in ripping it apart. But there’s no point beating around the bush. Chori Chori, sorry to say, is a crashing bore. Its flimsy storyline, as slender as its second lead Sonali Bendre’s waistline, threatens to collapse under burden of weightlessness.
The whiff of romance that could have pervaded the entire scenario just doesn’t go beyond the smooth surface of this sluggish romantic drama about love and related matters. It could have been cuddly. Instead, it’s indigestibly cute.
The somewhere-someone romantic yearning was earlier epitomized by Kajol in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and more recently, Esha Deol in Na Tum Jano Na Hum.
In Chori Chori, it’s the waiflike Rani Mukherjee living in a world of idealized romantic dreams while eking out a bachelor girl’s lonely existence in Delhi. Rani’s hangdog expressions and born-to-be-natural act remind you of Sandra Bullock in the Hollywood film While You Were Sleeping.
Milan Luthria’s romantic saga had the makings of an interesting romantic comedy. Tragically, it’s much too long and slow-paced to be of any interest to even the most diehard romantic in the audience. For starters, Rani’s single-ready-to-mingle act does appear interesting. The idea of a girl who sings at weddings waiting for her own moment of glorious fulfilment is arresting. Chori Chori could’ve been the reverse of Kalpana Lajmi’s Rudaali, where Dimple Kapadia played a professional mourner who can’t shed tears for her own life.
Luthria retards the romance by repeatedly evoking nostalgic images rather than seeking out contemporary areas of interest in the courtship. You know the waif will finally marry the rake. But what comes in-between? Acres of joint-family scenes with the ‘Virjis’ and ‘Chai-jis’ from a typical filmy Punjabi parivar crowding around the agonized couple. There’s also Shashikala and Sadashiv Amrapurkar as ‘bag lady’ and a tramp trying to find a place in the cluttered periphery.
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Every director from Sooraj Barjatya to Raj Kanwar has already gone through this terrain of family values. Luthria’s film would perhaps have made sense if it had come two years earlier (though considering its sluggish pace, even then audiences would’ve been hard put to stay still in their seats). Coming now, it’s less a labour of love, more like a love of the laboured, with the director toiling incessantly over the frozen frames in the effort to make the couple look as romantic as the snow-capped mountains of Shimla where the plot unfolds.
Talat Jani’s camera, Sajid-Wajid’s songs, and Babloo Chakrabarty’s background music help Luthria to a point. Thereafter, the director is on his own, weaving romantic dreams that need serious thawing. The editing (Sanjay Varma) could’ve been a lot tighter. In some sequences featuring Satish Shah, we actually hear the camera whirring noisily on the soundtrack.
The audience could forgive a sluggish film, but never a sloppy one. The performances don’t help carry the film forward. Ajay Devgan carries the inherent ennui in his personality to an excruciating limit. This once, the boredom can’t be passed off as subtle acting.
Rani Mukherjee’s character Khushi is certainly a wee removed from the conventional heroine. On paper, Khushi is the portrait of spirit and spunk. Like much of the film’s purported lyricism, the beauty of Khushi’s character simply dissolves in the vaporous mood of the end-product.
A word about Sonali Bendre. Tall, statuesque, and in command, she plays the Other Woman with style. Wonder why she has been relegated to the second lead.
