Akshay Kumar’s films got classier this millennium. There’s a certain restraint in his presence here. The way he conveys the pain and hurt of an impossible love is quite surprising for an actor who until recently was counted among the wooden.
Director Raj Kanwar’s recent efforts to polish up his act have yielded tepid results. Dhai Akshar Prem Ke and the box office hit Andaaz were louder than the lyrical aspirations of their creator. Kanwar gets it more right this time. The theme of ‘love versus obligation’ is nothing new to our cinema. The redemptive hope lies in the treatment. And we aren’t let down completely in the way the jukebox-symphony moves forward.
There’s a vague elegance in the movement of the mix ‘n’ match love story. Aditya (Akshay) and Jia (Katrina), engaged to marry the wrong life partners, must move towards that inevitable mutual embrace at the end, when the scrambled game of musical chairs finally ends. In between, there are several musical pieces choreographed with an eye-catching élan. One of them, filmed in a commodious banquet, even has yesteryears’ cabaret queen Helen breaking into a sassy jig.
Such moments are well-knitted into the tale of star-crossed love. Though the film suffers from Raj Kanwar’s trademark humbug (superfluous loud Punjabi characters grooving garishly to Bhangra-pop beats, crude gay jokes between Akshay and Mohan Joshi, coincidences peeking out of an otherwise-smooth narrative), there’s a touch of self-conscious suaveness in the storytelling that goes a long way in keeping the central romance from collapsing under the weight of self-importance.
The initial encounters between Aditya and Jia are deftly visualized. Vikas Shivraman’s camera frames the good-looking pair with arresting Valentinian vibrancy. The dialogues, you feel, could’ve gone easy on the rhetorics. Often you feel the lovers, fighting off their respective engagements to court true love, are reading their lines out of an invisible prompter.
But Akshay Kumar and Katrina look terrific together. Akshay’s controlled performance spotlights the character’s virtuosity in the midst of luscious temptation. Watch him in that almost wordless moment when his screen-friend Vivek Shouq (in a hideous blow-dried hairstyle) confesses he was behind the lovers’ break-up… Akshay gives a clenched interpretation to a role that doesn’t allow him to ‘do’ much on screen.
Katrina is passably competent in a tailor-made role, giving a mild emotional spin to a couple of scenes. But her inadequacies surface when pitched against Shernaz Patel (in a deplorably minuscule part) or even against Bipasha Basu who, in the brief role of Akshay’s ambitious fiancée, brings a fleeting finesse to her underwritten part. But pray, what’s Anil Kapoor doing playing Katrina’s arrogant, self-important fiancé? From the start, you know this couple is doomed.
Don’t look for surprises in this smooth-and-shiny romance or originality bits and pieces from various Hindi and Hollywood creations surface intermittently. But the queasy limit is the climax where Katrina is stuck upside down in a hit-and-run car. The whole sequence is lifted from this year’s Oscar winner Crash.
Akshay was totally taken up with Humko Deewana Kar Gaye. “It’s a totally new experience for me. You know, all love stories end with the couple living happily after. This story begins from the point where the perfect couple’s happiness ends when one of them falls in love with somebody else. Again, this film gives me a chance to be seen in a new light. What makes Humko Deewana Kar Gaye special is that it is based on a true love story. For the first time I play a real-life character. So far, all my characters have been fictional. To re-live a romance that actually happened was a strange experience. I enjoyed it tremendously.”
Akshay was quite impressed by Katrina and said, “She is tall, pretty and very focused on her work. People tell me we make a good on-screen pair. In fact, I am now doing my second film Welcome with Katrina. The producer Feroz Nadiadwala loves to shoot in Dubai. I enjoy it too.”
