Friday, December 16, 2011
Jo Hum Chahein
Greed is not Good
The director of Jo Hum Chahein, should at least be given some credit for gumption—Pawan has lifted the plot from no less a film than Wall Street (the Oilver Stone classic) and then made a blotchy attempt to Indianise it and place in today’s Mumbai.
The characters are trendily clad, ambitious, work hard-party harder types you see all around today. They also speak a Hindi-English hybrid lingo. That much Gill gets right, but a lot else is wrong. For instance, in Mumbai how many stock brokers and fund managers do you find featured on Page 3?
Rohan (Sunny Gill) is an up-and-coming stock broker, who is taken under the wing of an older, hawkish finance wiz Vikram (Alyy Khan), who in turn introduces him to a high net worth cougar Amrita (Achint Kaur). Rohan’s greed and career elevating compromises alienate him from his armyman father (Yuri Suri), his friend Abhay (Samar Virmani) and Neha (Simran Kaur Mundi), the girl he wooed and won with some difficulty. (The traditional type of girl is won over by a first ‘spiritual date’ ie a round of places of worship. Later she accuses him of pursuing her because she was not easily attainable, and also gets pregnant!)
Gill is unable to actually get across clearly what kind of financial wheeling-dealing Vikram and Amrita are involved in, so Rohan’s rise and fall are equally inexplicable. Neha breaks up with him when she finds him cheating on her, and the girl who wanted a career in showbiz turns into a weepy, whiny, simpering idiot. Her best friend (Mansi Multani)—a character mandatory in such films, shows a lot more spunk. She throws hot soup over the lousy boyfriend and then knees him where it hurts.
The screenplay of this YRF-wannebe chugs along over utterly uninteresting episodes in Rohan’s life, and the actors are just not equipped to deal with emotional complexities. Their very limited range of expressions and peculiar reading-off-teleprompter manner of speaking gets on the nerves. The weird lines are to blame too: Hum ek doosre ke fireworks hain; or Choozon ko paida hone se pehle mat gin! And here’s a sample of the lyrics: Peepni bajaaye dil, dham dham jaaye speaker hil, That's the way I wanna groove you aa aa. (Aaargh!)
Sunny Gill’s must have spent more time getting his hair into that bouffant-like puff than on his acting; Simran Kaur Mundi is given a part that is so weak, it won’t win her any fans. Boring and pointless would just about describe this one.
Labels: Cinemaah
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