Review I (By Subhash K Jha)
Tender as that drewdrop that perches on the window- sill after a monsoon shower, and yet as strongly assertive as that bindi that a woman puts on her forehead to declare her marital status Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is a curious and compelling mix of fragile and powerful emotions meshed together with a skill and subtlety that suggests the maturation of both the director Aditya Chopra and his leading man and Shah Rukh Khan.
Indeed, if Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge was the consummate boy-meets-girl 'chic' flick, Rab… is a comprehensive and evocative homage to the dreams aspirations loves lies and heartbreaks of the average middleclass couple.
Deftly edited(by Ritesh Soni) to imply a deep and indelible link between feelings and time passages, Rab Ne.. exudes an exceptional vigour in portraying two lives that could do with some of that quality.
Vigour is vigorously absent in our working-class hero Surinder Sahni's life.
We enter his bleak existence as he brings home a bride into his Amritsar neighbourhood filled with gawking mohallah -wallahs , all curious to know why Suri went to attend a marriage and came back with the bride.
It's a long story. Aditya Chopra , in no hurry to make his point, captures the coming gether of two very incompatible people(couldn't get any more incompatible than SRK and the confident debutante, could it?) with an elegance charm wit and warmth which one would expect to have gone with the wimp….and I do mean the wimp.
Wonderfully wimpy in his demeanour, Shah Rukh invents two different body languages the slouch and the swagger , to bring out the yin and yang aspects of the Great Indian Middleclass Dream.
One of the questions that bothers the wimpy Amol Palekar-meets-Vinay Pathak hero is, what does an Indian girl want? Diamonds, a Swiss account, a Japanese honeymoon?
"Just a man who loves her to death," sighs Suri's new bride. But she also adds, she has none to give.
And you wonder, are working-class dreams really that simple?
Aditya Chopra keeps them uncluttured and largely cleaned-out of unnecessary complications. In a playing-time of 1 hour and 40 minutes, there are just two main characters, a muted uncomplaining repressed besotted working-class husband and his distressed but dignified wife, occupying a house in Amritsar that's perfectly lit up. And by perfection we don't mean the perfection of cinema.
The kitchen, the two bedrooms upstairs and downstrairs(the couple stays separately under the same roof until their hearts collide on the dancefloor) the portico and the acres surrounding the protagonists convey a feeling of lives that have been around long before Ravi K Chandra's supple camera was set up.
Yes, you connect instantaneously and permanently with this warmly-written saga of a couple that discovers love in the strangest of places… the dance floor, for example, where Suri invents a remarkably hip-and-swaggering duplicate Raj , a doppelganger that's the opposite of Suri himself , and sweeps his own wife off her feet.
The comic drama that ensues is both engaging and heartbreaking. In portaying the working-class underdog and his larger-than-life double Shah Rukh Khan faces the greatest challenge of his career.
How to keep the two characters apart without making them appear black and white? The imaginary guy on the dancefloor Raj, a sleazeball with two left feet, transforms gradually into an emotional humanbeing as lonely as our poor Surinder . They both want to be loved. Awwww!
Shah Rukh plays his poignant working-class protagonist without making him look pitiable. The invented character Raj(a spoofy but not synthetic version of the flamboyant Raj from Dilwale Dulhaniya….) is even tougher to play.
You can't do underdog and super-hero without making both appear caricatural . Shah Rukh manages to keep his feet in two boats without rocking either. And yet rocking all the way.
Often he just lets his screen-wife, the super-confident down-to-earth debutante Anushka Sharma take over the screen. This time Shah Rukh is an attentive listener. He listens to the call of the heart and transmits the pain of love to the audience with a serious scarcity of the strenuous.
The third skilled performance comes from Vinay Pathak as Shah Rukh's emotionally unabashed best friend who conveniently, is a beautician(blissfully not gay) who helps Suri transform into Raj at the flick of switch.
There's no denying the fact that the director has chosen well. And we don't mean just the actors.
A large portion of the narrative leaves the couple in the sprawling Amritsar home to find their bearinga , and one another. It's these scenes that show the director's subtle skill at portraying lives that long for love and companionship but don't know how to get there.
There are vignettes from a middleclass marriage like the sequence where the wife eager to fufil her kitchen duties, serves Suri biryani.
But Suri, masquerading as Raj, has devoured earlier during the evening on paani-puris with his wife. She can be honest about her full appetite. He can't.
The dishonesty that colours and prejudices any intimate relationship is dealt with such sincerity and honesty you wonder if the institution of marriage was invented as a pretext for cinema such as this.
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Review II
Satyam Shahrukham Surinderam
How now. Meet Punjab Power Company's employee Surinder Sahni aka Suri. He crunches his breakfast toast, hangs out with a barber dost, and occasionally digs into a murgh musallam roast. He's a nice, ordinary sort of bloke on whom life has played a cruel joke. Croak?Our Simple Surinder-turned-Rocking Raj makes you laugh and sob alternately. Honestly, after quite a long famine you're treated to a banquet of entertainment.
No, no, not at all. You don't have to pity the bespectacled, Clark Gable-moustachioed Suri of Aditya Chopra's Rab ne Bana di Jodi. In fact, the Amritsar-domiciled Suri is a soul brother to the mousy Clark-Kent-cum-Superman. And of other dual-personality-toting wonders from a wild variety of sources such as V Shantaram's Navrang, Raj Kapoor's Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Golmaal (Hrishikesh Mukherjee's, please), and even a faint shade of Jerry Lewis' Nutty Professor. In effect, you get two SRKs for the price of one. A kind of Satyam Shahrukham Surinderam.
Our Simple Surinder-turned-Rocking Raj makes you laugh and sob alternately. Honestly, after quite a long famine you're treated to a banquet of entertainment. For most part of the way, the spread is fun, feel-wonderful and perhaps expectedly, shouldered by a 10-on-10 performance by Shah Rukh Khan. Often when the screenplay flags, he keeps you engaged with his effortless schizophrenic shifts from a mild-mannered nerd to a jazzy Joe. Glow.Quite clearly, the plot is as improbable as a flying kangaroo and as antiquated as a dinosaur. There are tacky interludes, too, like the sumo wrestling bout and the special effects lights switched on and off in Amritsar.
Indeed, you wonder how the actor pulls it all off with conviction even when Aditya Chopra's story, at its very concept, is absolutely implausible. You keep worrying why a woman can't tell the difference between Surinder and Raj (not even the good old fake 'massa' or birth pimple here). Is she plain blind, short-sighted or ditzy? And why does the director eventually lapse into utterly regressive stuff towards the finale with the woman falling at the man's feet? She even equates him with God. They don't use the words pati parmeshwar. Yet, Chopra's chauvinistic slip shows. Not done.
Quite clearly, the plot is as improbable as a flying kangaroo and as antiquated as a dinosaur. There are tacky interludes, too, like the sumo wrestling bout and the special effects lights switched on and off in Amritsar. Also, the running time is too lengthy. And the finale dance competition - both in its prize and in its presentation (too many flashback inserts) - is not even in the dramatic, suspense-fraught league of the TV Baliyes and Dikhlajas. Moreover, the self-congratulatory references to one's own hits (Dilwale Dulhaniya.., Dhoom) just don't spell class.
With so many rock-strong reservations, then, why is your heart still upbeat? That's because at the core, there's something very sensitive and supportive being said about the little David who has to fight the big Goliaths every day, the biggest one being his own anxieties and personality imbalances. That's Surinder Sahni (Shah Rukh Khan), who's been trundling along in a dispiriting 9 to 5 desk job till he's coerced into a marriage with a younger woman (Anushka Sharma). He likes her, she likes him not. Slow and steady, like the tortoise he hopes she will give him love some day. Maybe, maybe not.
More metaphorical than 'real', the conflict is between a girl who believes in grandeur, dance and monsoon drives, and a common man who strives to fit into her wonder world. A line of dialogue encapsulates it all. "Neither do I have any great hopes of finding love, nor do I have any great need for it," Suri says. Frankly, as a dialogue writer Chopra scores much higher than he does in the other writing departments.
The barber friend's characterisation is just about passably etched but finely performed by Vinay Pathak. In terms of negative virtues, the absence of a back story for Surinder (what no tais, daais and khandaan koonba?) is a welcome relief. Ditto, the exile of gossip spewing mohalla stereotypes.
Ravi C Chandran's camerawork is efficient. Salim Suleiman's music score is remarkable essentially for the title song. The set designs are serviceable, with the Dil To Pagal Hai hangover persisting over the disco-practice hall. Incidentally, the movie medley number is imaginatively choreographed by Shiamak Davar, with Kajol, Bipasha Basu and Rani Mukherji adding to the boogie allure. Preity Zinta and Lara Dutta look totally out of sorts in this sequence though.
Debutante Anushka Sharma is assured and upright but you wouldn't kill to eat paani puris with her, the way Suri-cum-Raj does. Incontestably, Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is an SRK show. The end credits with snapshots is a delight, don't miss them. The actor sends you home with a smile and a tear. So, here's a must-grab-ticket to SRK.
Rating: 4/5
