As a mainstream entertainer, debutant director Dinkar Kapur’s film Yeh Kaisi Mohabbat falls short of cinematic requirements. As a crime drama and a whodunit, Yeh Kaisi Mohabbat equates spasmodically slapped-on red herrings as an indication of the film’s inner strength as a suspense drama.
Yeh Kaisi Mohabbat starts as a sleazy depiction of an easy life. For about 20 minutes after the credits, the director brings on a comic interlude with Johnny Lever as a perpetually inebriated Sardarji who keeps stumbling onto our acutely inadequate hero Vicky (debutant Krishna) for some high-powered revelry.
Lever and the other members of the supporting cast work hard to infuse life in a plot as dead as the murder victim, Priya (the Mauritian walking-talking wooden cupboard Viveka Babaji). There are seeds of a good pulpy potboiler-styled whodunit in the pulverized proceedings. A mega-ambitious layabout, Vicky stumbles on to what he thinks is the key to his mercantile ambitions when a rich-looking woman, Tina(debutante Deeksha), gives him the glad eye.
A series of Sandeep Chowta songs follows before Vicky comes clean with the girl. But the plot decides to do a murky number on Vicky. He’s framed and charged for the murder of his tycoon boss, Sharad Kapoor’s, wanton wife.
Besides Lever, whose alcohol-laden performance and outrageous dialogues(“What’s alcohol worth if it doesn’t reek on your breath?”) evoke a train of titters, it’s Mukesh Rishi, that oversized rabblerouser who was first noticed seriously in John Matthew’s Sarfarosh, who raises the proceedings from the ‘dread’.
His loud, aggressive policing is punctuated by slurpy crowd-pulling gimmicks like a crick in the neck that Rishi relives loudly, reminding us of the martial arts films where the heroes flex their muscles in audio-visual flamboyance. Director Kapur seems to have worked quite hard on the stunts. The derringdo on invisible cables seems to have come into vogue after Vikram Bhatt’s Awaara Paagal Deewana. It’s one thing to have Akshay Kumar flying and somersaulting in the air like a belligerent boomerang. Watching the callow novice masquerading as a high-flying hero in Yeh Kaisi Mohabbat is like trying to steer a motorboat in a muddy pond.
The canvas and the volume of characters who affect Kapur’s plot in often-unpredictable ways is astonishingly large. For a film that features two exceptionally uncharismatic newcomers in the lead, the canvas of storytelling is incongruously large. The sets are often lavish, and the songs have been shot on sprawling sets representing the art director’s most outlandish fantasies. Cinematographer S. Pappu follows the postcard-pretty route to optical salvation. Malaysia masquerades as Mumbai in a movie where murder is a catalyst for titillation. The songs and the background music by Sandeep Chowta try to add an extra sheen to the scene.
For a murder mystery, the frequency of outdoor shots is unusually high. It almost seems as though the director wanted to escape the claustrophobic compulsions of a convoluted crime thriller by diverting our attention away from the ongoing tensions that are piled on without a semblance of inner conviction.
Debutant director Dinkar Kapur needs lessons in pacing. For a suspense thriller, an unflagging momentum is all-important. In Yeh Kaisi Mohabbat, Johnny Lever’s protracted comic track and the reams of romantic duets cut into the suspense and reduce the audience’s participation to almost nil.
The denouement is unexpected, though not fully credible. As a workaday whodunit in the style of successful Hindi commercial films like Gumnam, Police Public, 100 Days, and Khiladi, Yeh Kaisi Mohabbat would have worked better with more competent principal actors. Krishna and Deeksha would find it hard to get roles in television soaps,let alone feature films. Viveka Babaji has a better screen presence. But she plays the murder victim and is therefore better off dead. The supporting cast is pretty strong. Watching Deepak Tijori lapse into facial convulsions on camera, we‘re reminded of that other entity which is also stricken by a mysterious convulsion-inducing illness: the suspense thriller. Apart from Abbas-Mustan, why haven’t we produced a single competent shiver-giver in Hindi commercial cinema?
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