Movie: Kehtaa Hai Dil Baar Baar

Actors: Paresh Rawal, Jimmy Shergill, Kim Sharma
Director: Rahul Dholakhia, Producer:

Movie Review

Impossible Dream!

Rahul Dholakhia’s film ‘Kehtaa Hai Dil Baar Baar’

Reviewed by Anil Saari Arora

Indian expatriates in North America can’t make a first-rate Bollywood fillum! That’s quite clear now. They might be better than the desis back home at a lot of things – such as cardiology or Pentium designing – but they’d better accept that they’ve been pretty ninth-rate when it comes to making a true-blue ‘Bumbaiya fillum’! Director Rahul Dholakhia’s ‘Kehtaa Hai Dil Baar Baar’, starring the Yash Chopra discoveries Jimmy Shergill and Kim Sharma, as well as the inimitable Paresh Rawal, is the new piece of evidence to that effect.

Were it not for Paresh Rawal’s impeccable spoof on the worst features of the Indian’s obsession with money, the film would have been a washout. ‘Kehtaa Hai Dil Baar Baar’ should, I believe, persuade other expat Indian film-makers to play it safe, follow Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, Jagmohan Mundhra, Gurinder Chaddha and Somnath Sen, and make art-films or films with a social concern, rather than endeavor to mimic their favorite film-makers from Bollywood; because the making of a worthwhile Bumbaiya fillum can’t, it seems, be done in North America!

As a film theorist, I have always believed that there is a lot to be learnt from the worst films. Of course, that’s not as revolutionary an idea as it sounds, because as the chroniclers of the French New Wave told us in the ‘60s, Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol picked up a lot of innovative tricks from C-grade Hollywood westerns. Therefore, I came out of the cold, overly air-conditioned, largely unpopulated, cinema hall showing ‘Kehtaa Hai Dil Baar Baar’ with a couple of lessons learnt.

Firstly, I’ve come to the conclusion that anybody who wants to make a Bumbaiya fillum should, as an exercise in creative discipline, not see too many Bollywood films himself/herself, while one is writing out one’s own fillum; because then you brainwash yourself that there are certain items and elements that are a priori and must be included in your Bumbaiya fillum. One ends up imitating one’s favorite film-sequences.

In ‘Kehtaa Hai Dil Baar Baar’ we, therefore, have one song sequence that looks like a clone of the romantic landscapes that Yash Chopra uses for his love songs. Then there’s another, a dandiya number, which tries very, very hard to echo the sensuality of the ‘nimguda’ number in ‘Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam’. There’s a third that harks back to the razzmatazz choreography of ‘Shaava Shaava’ in Karan Johar’s ‘K3G’.

Unfortunately, neither Dholakhia nor his choreographer is in the same league as the guys they’re inspired by. So that puts paid to the film’s musical score-sheet. This is not going to be remembered as one of the films in which Jatin-Lalit recreated magic!

The second lesson that I got out of what Dholakhia’s dil keeps saying again and again, is that you can’t just have one strong, well-etched character in the movie. If he had Paresh Rawal in a powerful, author-backed, role, as the richie-rich father of the girl (Kim Sharma) then it was imperative for the film’s writer-director to have a couple of additional author-backed characters, as a foil for Rawal’s character.

As Roger Patel, who now owns 25 motels on the East Coast and who remains as miserly as he ever could be, Paresh Rawal stands out in splendid isolation. The others around him are dull, flat, side-characters. For example, Mrs. Roger Patel, who ought to have been a specimen in her own right if this film was to have any kind of drama; as also his daughters who have absolutely colorless characterizations despite the ethnic resplendence of their costumes (that’s Kim Sharma and another girl, who’s prettier). None of these three women have one, solitary, line of repartee to shoot at Roger Patel, and he is condemned to be a brilliant wit surrounded by dull conversationalists.

The third thing I’ve learnt from my latest visit to the movies is that Jhonny Lever (with his new atrociously spelt first-name) is no good as a comedian if the audience can’t understand what he’s saying. The only time I got a hang of the guttural sounds emanating out of Lever’s thyroid gland was a four-line parody of Johnny Walker; and that was quite admirable, but a bit brief in terms of the film’s 100-minute length. For the rest of the film his dialogues grunt like an unintelligible sound effect.

Never having been to the ever-ever land of North America, I may not be the best analyst to attempt an answer to two critical questions: Why do the Bollywood-genre film-makers of North America totally ignore the decent requisites of a story, and the need to depict some kind of motivation for the next sequence of events that takes place in the lives of their characters?

Why must these venerable film directors imitate the worst scripts from Bombay? Why not take a cue from the American way of making movies? Or is story-telling the only thing that North America does not know – for the non-resident Indian? For instance, there was no reason why Jimmy Shergill’s character could not have been more adroitly developed. After all, in running an ‘India on Wheels’ one-man food van in New York, the young man is re-counting the early years Roger Patel himself spent, before he acquired his 25 motels in New Jersey. Didn’t that deserve some space in a story about the young man’s serenade of love?

The storyline of ‘Kehtaa Hai Dil Baar Baar’ belongs to the B-grade Bumbaiya fillums of the ‘60s and ‘70s, which were pale imitations of Shammi Kapoor movies about the promising but poor young man who has to contend with the rich father of the heroine.

The inane storyline makes a couple of things crystal clear.

Firstly, not many Indian film directors can effectively depict the excitement of young love, especially in detail and its minute emotional nuances. But for the exceptions (such as Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor, Yash Chopra and Sooraj R. Barjatya) the others leave much of that difficult task to their choreographers, lyricists and cameramen. In ‘Kehtaa Hai Dil Baar Baar’, the director abjures from the responsibility altogether.

Secondly, though she is a Yash Chopra discovery, Kim Sharma has a long way to go as an actress.

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