Raj Kumar Santoshi’s take on Bimal Roy’s 1950s’ classic Sujata, which Santoshi wanted to make ten years ago, is turned by Kundan Shah into an ambrosial romantic comedy, full of sweet, tender moments signifying a celebration of unalloyed laughter and tears in a perfectly palatable package.
Like Nutan in Roy’s Sujata, Preity Zinta, in a sturdy author-backed role, plays Rekha’s “untouchable” daughter. Shah re-defines untouchability in modern, extremely melodramatic terms. While in the original the adoptive girl was a Harijan street-child, here Shalu (Zinta) is the illegitimate daughter of her mother’s dead husband (Sachin Khedekar).
In the first half of this leisurely paced, hankie-prankish film, we get the pranks, most of them courtesy our leading lady. Zinta once again displays a comic aptitude akin to Lucille Ball and Goldie Hawn in Hollywood. Rampal, playing her boss masquerading as his own driver, tries hard to match his cute co-star’s ‘waif’ length. But Zinta kind of gobbles Rampal up with unselfconscious relish.
Director Kundan Shah, returning to the arcadian romantic laughter of his 1980s’ comedy Kabhi Han Kabhi Na, derives a great deal of innocent pleasure in throwing the dimpled twosome, the buoyant Zinta and the bravely reactive Rampal, together in intelligently constructed song sequences done in the Hollywoodian style and in a bubbling babble of courtship games.
One song (Chahe Zubaan Se) has the pair weaving their lyrics in and out of an unheedful office filled with buzzing activity.
The first half is breezy and buoyant enough to make us think warm thoughts about Zinta’s comic timing. But in the second half, Shah gets into the sacrificial mode. After all, this is Sujata, and Rekha’s adoptive neglected rebellious daughter must sacrifice her love for the US-returned rakish entrepreneur when Rekha’s pampered and protected biological daughter Mahima falls for the same guy.
Though ‘trite’ and tested, the second half too has been handled by the director with a certain transparent sensitivity. Regrettably, Zinta isn’t as comfortable playing the sacrificial lamb as she is the mewing mischief-maker. Delightfully, in one pre-interval moment, when Zinta pulls a prank on the over-earnest entrepreneur-hero, the director synchronizes her trademark laughter with the mewing of a lamb.
You wish the fun-and-games would continue in the second half. But no, Hindi films have to change their colour from grin to grim. Otherwise, Indian moviegoers tend to feel cheated. Hence begins the otherwise-jaunty romantic comedy’s downhill journey, with Zinta atoning for her ambivalent guilt as the intrusive progeny by bringing on a storm of sacrificial whiplashes into the narrative.
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The villainy by a pair of white-collar brothers in clumsy wigs and a thickly accented hood (Govind Namdeo) is like an eye-rolling homage to mainstream conventions rather than necessary evil.
The film belongs to Zinta from the first frame till last. Even Rekha, as the immaculately done-up mother, hardly gets a word in edgewise. When she does make her presence felt, Rekha’s required to turn shrewish and anti-maternal, lashing out at her poor, perennially neglected non-biological daughter with distasteful shrillness.
Rekha is visibly ill-at-ease playing the shrill shrew. In fact, the most disappointing factor in the film is her nebulous presence. So busy is the script celebrating Zinta’s blithe-spirited presence that even the mighty Rekha appears to be a shadowy figure invented to contour the shades in the central character.
Mahima Chowdhary, as Zinta’s sympathetic stepsister, struggles to titivate her underwritten part with tangibility. Even Shashikala, who played the role in Sujata, had a hard time keeping her head above the tidal wave of Nutan’s presence. Fortunately for Mahima, Preity Zinta is more akin to Tanuja than her sister Nutan.
Dil Hai Tumhaara is soft at its heart, so much so that those looking for the seamy, sordid, or darker side of life are prone to be blinded by the bright light that pierces through the film’s crisp-and-captivating canvas. Although the film’s pace slackens considerably towards the end, we never stop being interested in the proceedings. Kundan Shah’s new film may not qualify as a romantic classic, but there’s an intelligent, deeply thoughtful mind at work behind the facile triangular tensions, trying to create pockets of reposeful relevances within the given conventional format. Jehangir Chowdhury’s camerawork, together with the amiable star cast, go a long way into making Dil Hai Tumhaara as enjoyably as a bowl of soft, mushy tangerine jello on a quiet summer afternoon.
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