That is indeed the case.  

According to their website, and just confirmed by Dylan Marchetti, the Director of Theatrical Acquisitions and Programming at  ImaginAsian, two Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna showings  are already sold out at the ImaginAsian theater in Manhattan, and the film’s a good 11 days away from opening!

Update (Monday evening):   Dylan Marchetti has since also said  that to celebrate the film’s opening there will be giveaways for people on line at the theater, and, once inside, they’ll find  an expanded line of pastries and samosas from local NYC restaurants at the concession.

 

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness last night in the packed theater, and that familiar,  twinkly background of the Eros banner loomed onscreen, I realized how lovely that moment  is, like at the start of an evening with someone you’ve been longing to see, and suddenly there he is, just walked in and sat down across the  table from  you.   There’s a small jolt inside, as you revel in the thought that you’ve got at least a good three hours ahead of you.

Roll credits.   [Now Vivek Oberoi has changed the spelling of his name to Viveik.   How clunky does that look in print?   Gawd, exactly how superstitious are actors anyway?   And in numerology terms, do they change the Devanagri spelling of their names too, or does this only work in Roman letters?]

The movie opens with Saif Ali Khan (Langda), in an even badder bad-guy role than  in  Being Cyrus, informing  Rajju (played by India’s answer to Steve Buscemi),  a would-be bridegroom, that his fiancée  Dolly (Kareena Kapoor) has been carried away by the local goonda, Omkara, or Omi, for short.   The camera is so close up on Saif, that it distorts the proportion of his facial features, making his  overly feminine  eyes – with their feline shape and fluttery lashes – shrink, and the nose, normally long and sharp, appear swollen.   Given that his hair is barely a centimeter’s height of fuzz, as he looms overs us in that first scene, he is ugly and menacing.   Uuuf, and the language out of that mouth!   No wonder his teeth are yellow.   And wait ’til you see how sinister he is able to make the word  ”Achcha?” sound.  

This is definitely not a movie to brings kids to, at least those that are big enough  to exit the theater repeating their discovery of words like  ”ch*tiya” to all you encounter.

As the opening credit’s themselves herald, this is Vishal Bhardwaj’s Hindi version of Othello, set in his native Uttar Pradesh.   If you know the story, here’s the breakdown of who’s playing which role:

• Omkara = Othello = Ajay Devgan
• Langda = Iago = Saif Ali Khan
• Kesu = Cassio = Viveik Oberoi  
• Dolly = Desdemona = Kareena Kapoor
• Indu = Emilia = Konkona Sen Sharma
• Billo = Bianca = Bipasha Basu
• Bhaisaab =  Duke of Venice  = Naseeruddin Shah

The story, in short, centers  around Omkara (repeatedly referred to as a half-caste) who has just helped Dolly elope from her previously scheduled wedding so she can (willingly) be with him.   At the same time, as Bhaisaab moves up politically, he elevates Omi to a higher position, meaning  Omi has to name a deputy.   Saif, who has been loyal to Omkara for a long time, assumes he’s it, but is passed over for the boyish Kesu, who’s  a valuable choice because he  can guarantee a large number of college-age kids’ votes for Bhaisaab in the next election.  

The coronation takes place high on a hilltop with crowds gathered below just as people  were at  Saint Peter’s in Rome last year, waiting to learn the verdict.    Ajay, Naseeruddin, Viveik and Saif sit shirtless with a pandit, performing a ritual.   [I would be remiss if I did not comment here that all four guys look quite good sans chemise, aside from the gross discovery that on an otherwise spartan back, Viveik has a inverted pyramid-shaped patch of hair just below his nape and almost equidistant between his shoulder blades.   Ugh.   Dude, the metrosexual may be dead, and the retrosexual may be in now, but a little manscaping is not a bad thing.]  

Seething with anger – in a  brilliant, short scene –  Saif is at home, staring at himself in the mirror, which he slams with a fist and breaks, smearing his own blood in horizontal swath across his forehead, mimicking Omi’s actions earlier when he chose Kesu.   He then sets in motion a string of events designed to make Omi believe he’s being cuckholded by hamari Bebo.  

And a word or two about the girl formerly known as Poo.   She’s not half bad here.   As in Chup Chup Ke, part of the saving grace is that she doesn’t speak much, but rather she emotes through those limpid eyes and turns in a rather demure role.   Though I find her (and her smug arrogance) terribly grating, even when she’s  frozen in photos, I will admit that the unusual face is a beautiful amalgam of disparate elements.

Though Cyprus is now UP, the background story is still about men playing (often fatal) politics with each other.   Naseeruddin Shah (with a totally shaved pate) is the mellow, fatherly  Bhaisaab, angling for the past five years for a seat in the Lok Sabha.   He is his usual good self in this film, though in this  role  he’s more part of the scenery than a primary focus.

Ajay Devgan plays a part, as  in Company, that suits him far better than that of Michael Mukherjee in Yuva.   He makes a fantastic entrance in the film, awoken from his sleep, he appears wrapped in a large black blanket with a red trim, that he will often carry  with him,  Linus-like,  throughout the  fillum.  

 

And when he’s out in daytime, he sports the most wonderful pair of large black shades that would make Karunanidhi  jealous.   Like in Company, he does his minimalist thing  well, tight and controlled.   On a purely superficial level, aside from that cheesy Village People  biker guy moustache, he looks trim and in great shape for a fella  who’s, what, in his late 30s or 40?   Then again,  given his Dad’s career, maybe there was an emphasis on fitness in the Devgan home all along.  

The love scenes are sensual and erotically charged.    Just as Iranian directors slip and slide around censors, because we don’t get to see  even one  mouth-to-mouth kiss, never mind any actor’s naughty bits, the director has to figure out how make it hot onscreen nonetheless, and that constraint works in our favor.   I mean, really, are we that curious to see Saif’s wee-wee?   Well, ok, maybe some of us are, just once, but after that, the thrill would wear off, I’m sure.   So Bhardwaj telegraphs it all by slow, flowing gestures and touches; Kareena’s belly being softly kissed, Konkona’s  bare back dotted with post-coital persperation, and so on.   As in Fanaa, there is also pre-marital hanky panky going on here, and no one bats an eye.

One lovely surprise in this movie is Konkona Sen Sharma.   I wasn’t wowed by Page 3, never really understood all the raves.   Though  I thought she was o.k. in it, it wasn’t a performance  to go wild over, but in Omkara,   as Indu, sister to Omkara and wife to Langda, we first see her when Omi brings his fiancée back to live at the family compound.   Her brother may be a tough-guy, but to Indu, he’s still her brother and so, fair game.    She jokes with him as soon as she sees how beautiful (and “fair”) Dolly is, making comments that together the couple  are like a lump of coal in a glass of milk, or the gold flute being played by the dark Lord, and so on.   Her character is warm, earthy and practical, and Konkona inhabits her comfortably.   In one scene, where she remarks over how well Dolly cooks, Dolly explains that her grandmother told her the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and Konkona drolly retorts “My grandmother told me to set my sights a little lower.”

Viveik, as Omi’s  young deputy,  looks as puppy dog cute as always, with the soft shiny hair, molten eyes and worried eyebrows, and here he basically does a reprise of his role in Company, though playing a college-educated rogue this time.   (Has anyone else noticed that  he, like Akshay Khanna, does that teepee thing with  his eyebrows?)   On a separate note, I had to laugh in one scene where he told someone he was talking to on his mobile “SM kardo” (“Text me later.”)  

 

And here’s a fun little game to play when you see this movie: try to keep count of how many different plaid shirts Kesu wears.   (I didn’t start ’til part of the way through, but I’d guesstimate about 10.   If it were not for the Steve McQueen aviator sunglasses and the bike, he’d run the risk of being quite dorky.)   For a guy who is a thug, he portrays a certain degree of innocence and vulnerability at the same time.   In the scene just before Bipasha’s fantastic Beedi number, he openly admits (soon to his regret) to  Langda and other guys that he can’t hold his liquor.   This is where Langda expels  his first evil “Achcha?” and sets up a scenario that  gets Kesu into a bloody fight and Omi’s bad books.

Bipasha Basu as Billo has a smaller role than the others, but she is delightful when she’s onscreen.   Playing a singer, she does two  dance  numbers in all her almond-eyed Bong beauty.   As  Kesu’s love interest she is equally as flirty and in-demand as he, though she does give her heart to him eventually, only to be tricked – by Langda, of course  - into believing that he’s cheating on her.  

 

In the scene where she  gets that information, she’s outside hanging laundry on a line, her wet hair wrapped in a towel,  with no make-up on and she is  so compelling to look at, but  in a different way than when she’s  performing, all flashing eyes and teeth.   In some of her earlier roles, she seemed rather skeevy to me, and I mentally wrote her off, but  now, I am  curious to see what she’s capable of when not playing the vamp.   I brought Apaharan back from Bombay a little while ago, and am looking forward to see what she does in it.      

The sets and costumes are both beautifully executed.   The small details like old political posters in various degrees of peeling off walls around town rang true, and Omi’s home compound looked and felt like an actual  home, not a Bollywood set.   Given the dry beige countryside and the I’m-a-lumberjack-and-I’m-o.k. outfits on Saif and others, the film does have  the feel of an old  Hollywood  Western, which is also echoed in the design of the movie’s posters and even in the choice of font.   In a recent Rediff interview, Bhardwaj himself admits that UP could be a “…crazy, Wild West kind of place.”

In the same interview, Bhardwaj reveals that he wanted the actors to get the UP dialect and accent so right that he recorded himself on CD doing all their lines and had it sent to each of them.   To my amateur ear, I did hear  shaadi become saadi, zabardast turn into jabardast, and zaroor pronounced jaroor.  

One slight misstep that could have been written better is the scene just before the Interval where Langda first plants the seed in Omi’s mind that Dolly might be cheating on him with Kesu.    I couldn’t help but think that Langda’s hints are too blatant for a man talking to his (sometime violent) boss about such a delicate subject, and also that Omi’s immediate suspicion doesn’t ring true.   Later, as Omi’s tension and suspicion mounts, he confronts Langda with  a homoerotic gesture, forcing his rather thick revolver into his  brother-in-law’s mouth, threatening to shoot, which was interesting to me as I recalled that  it has been suggested in the past that Iago’s obsession with Othello could have had gay overtones.

After the Interval, as Omkara’s suspicion mounts and Kesu’s been banished for the earlier fight (sent on the un-deputy-like mission of delivering Omi and Dolly’s wedding invitations) – side note: even in the remaking of Othello, a Hindi movie must have at least one wedding! – there is a scene that is wonderfully filmed.   Kesu, fuming, riding through the narrow lanes of the town on his motorbike, with a big stack of invites mounted on his handlebars, is suddenly blocked by a guy in a car, who has stopped to talk on his mobile.   As Kesu  dismounts from the bike and goes to confront the driver, the shot shifts from ground level to a rooftop point-of-view, and we find ourselves looking down, through phone and electrical wires, at Kesu as he beats up the guy who’s in his way, and the filmmakers have seen to it to add the realistic touch of a blue and white paper kite, lost since who-knows-when, tangled up in those same wires through which we’re observing the action.  

There is also a well  scripted scene towards the end, where Omi is forced by Indu to tell her what’s been causing his change in attitude toward Dolly, and when she learns of his fears, she berates  him in a monologue about how much women will sacrifice to be with the men they love (sing it, sister!), yet it is never enough and they are always subject to suspicion and criticism at the drop of a hat.   As Indu, Konkona plays the loving sister-in-law that we’d all love to gain if and when the day comes for us to marry.   She makes a refreshing change from most Hindi movies, where the s-i-l blindly worships the ground her bhaiyya walks on and is all too quick to find fault with the family’s new bahu.  

As the tangled lives and story lines come together at the wedding and its inevitable, awful outcome, there were two more  plot points that struck me as slightly off: first, why didn’t Billo come to the wedding preparations, given that she was now Kesu’s fiancée?   This would have changed the course of the whole denouement completely.    And how likely is it really that the dialogue scripted for Kesu  would have unfurled the way it did, without him mentioning Billo’s name even once, and when  Langda put him on speakerphone, wouldn’t Kesu  have noticed and said something like “Hey man, why did you do that?   Who’s there with you?”  

But it is Othello, and what happens had to happen, and after an amazing confrontation scene with Konkona and Saif, we return to the bridal chamber and are left with a tragically beautiful image of red and white and that swing that was so central to Omi and Dolly’s physical love.

I can’t wait to see it a second time, and buy the DVD when it comes out.

See it or skip it?

See it!   Omkara is a lively retelling of a centuries old story that also contains enough of  the popular elements of Hindi cinema to keep it from being too dry or arty-farty.

 

In the most recent episode of the HBO series Entourage that aired in the U.S. last weekend, Vince and his buddies go through opening day of the actor’s big budget release  Aquaman, tracking the opening grosses and comparing them to the opening weekend of Spiderman.   Initially, only E is interested in how the two movies compare, but by the time the 28 minutes of the show have run their course, everyone is looking over their shoulder at Peter Parker’s red and blue stretchy-suited alter ego.  

I had a similar sensation at Krrish tonight, at the 10 p.m. and final showing of the night at the local Indian multiplex.   (By the way, I must find out if  this is the first time a big Bollywood release has opened in the U.S. a full day before India, and why.)   The action hero scenes shot amid the high-rises of Singapore called to mind Spiderman, while Krrish’s movements and fight scenes themselves were a melange of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix.   Not that that’s an entirely bad thing; we all know how often Bollywood takes its inspiration from other movies.   Of  all three of the aforementioned movies, I’d say that technically Krrish  approaches Crouching Tiger most: there’s a lot of running and climbing by hopping quickly from one place to another, when not bouncing off trees, branches and  bodies of water.  

Krrish is the story of Krishna, the son of Rohit Mehra, the character that Hrithik Roshan played in Koi Mil Gaya.   He has the same magical powers that his special father did, and, growing up parentless, Krishna has been raised by his grandmother, played by Rekha.   (It was  a surprise for me to see her with grey streaks in her hair and the stiff gait of a woman in her 70s, given her recent, wince-inducing appearance  in Bachke Rehna Re Baba and her item number as the heavy-lidded, somewhat fleshy  vamp in Parineeta.)  

 

Grandmother and grandson have lived an idyllic and isolated existence up in the green hills and mountains of Manali.   She wants to  protect him, as she believes it was her son’s powers, and the evil intentions of a Dr. Arya (portrayed with relish by Naseeruddin Shah)  that led to his death.   All goes as planned until a camping group of young people shows up, including two Singapore-based friends, Honey and Priya (the doe-eyed Priyanka Chopra).   Priya, out paragliding, gets into trouble when she lands high up in a tree and Krishna amazingly is able to fly to the top and carry her to safety.   It doesn’t take long before he’s in love with her.   Aside from the ridiculous amount of ear-splitting screaming that Priya does, the scene does convey well the amazement  between two people as they stare into each other’s eyes that something is happening.

Priya and  Honey return to Singapore and their jobs at a television network.    Having stayed away five days longer than allowed, they are about to be fired by the boss (Archana Puran Singh, doing her customary Hot Aunty role, with a dollop of Bossy Harpy thrown in) when Honey has a brainwave: they’ll get Krishna to come to Singapore and film his superpowers, and by getting this scoop, they’ll be saved.   Priya lies to Krishna, telling him if he doesn’t come right away and meet her mother, she’ll be married off to someone else.  

Though he’s stated he’d never leave his grandmother, he gets her approval and shows up at the Singapore airport in his father’s dorky, I’m-with-the-Gestapo-geek-squad trench coat.   While he takes up temporary residence in the metropolis, Priya’s efforts to trick him into performing on film fail, but she finds herself falling in love with the muscular but unassuming hunk.   Before leaving home, his grandmother extracts a promise from Krishna that he will never use his powers in front of people, but when a fire breaks out at a  circus,  he feels compelled to step in and save lives, so  he dons a black mask and turns the nerdy coat inside out to reveal a shiny leather trench straight from  the costume cupboard of The Night Porter.  

And Krrish is born.

While Krishna’s  romancing Priya and saving children from a burning tent, his father’s crooked business partner and megalomaniac, Dr. Arya,  is  on the verge of recreating Krishna’s father’s invention: The Computer that Allows  You to See the Future.   You know that the paths of these two men will cross as the story comes to a climax.  

So this is Hindi cinema’s first superhero movie, such a newsworthy event that even the New York Times has written about it.   The budget is reported to have been between $7 and $10 million, and to prepare for the role, Hrithik Roshan trained  with Tony Ching Siu Tung (of The Hero and House of Flying Daggers) on how to do wire stunts.   The training and the green-eyed boy’s natural grace lend a gliding fluidity to the action scenes.

The only other movies I’d seen Hrithik Roshan in were K3G and Lakshya.   In this movie too, he has several opportunities to show off his dancing ability and he is a joy to watch.   The Dil Na Diya number has shades of Ek Pal Ka Jeena for the way it highlights Hrithink’s footwork.   His face is quite compelling to behold too.   Technically, you would think that a nose as long as his would be a strike against him, but somehow, it works, probably because you find yourself – when he’s in close-ups – staring at his eyes and trying to figure out which order the concentric circles of brown, light gold and green appear.   His pre-Singapore wardrobe could have included some long- or short-sleeved shirts; he spent that entire part of the film in a sleeveless sweater/shirt and soon in you think “Ok, we get it, he’s got big muscles!”   I found the long hair distracting in some scenes.   Early on, it was ruffled and curly and went well with the whole quasi-Tarzan thing Krishna had going on, but in other scenes, where it was straighter and darker, it just seemed off, and at one point I thought to myself “That’s the same hairstyle Monica Lewinsky had for a time!”  

Priyanka Chopra plays The  Beautiful Girlfriend role well enough, but it’s not a terribly taxing one.   Her Singapore wardrobe consisted of several outfits that included several pairs of pretty low-slung jeans, the lowest I’ve seen in a Bollywood movie so far.

Product placement was all over: Tide detergent (also prominent in Chup Chup Ke), Lays chips, Samsung electronics and Bournavita.

The soundtrack is enjoyable enough, moreso than that of KANK I’d say, but there are no WOW! moments, where you think “I’ve gotta get that number onto my iPod work-out playlist.”    One song – Chori Chori Chup Ke Chup Ke – comes from what I’d refer to as the filmi school of bullock carts,  flute and drums numbers (you know, the scene where the hero or heroine, or both, return to the countryside (think Veer-Zaara or even Pardesi Babu) and appreciate how beautiful it is.

See it or skip it?  

See it!   This movie is a first in Hindi film history, but bring a cushion, because it runs over three hours.   (The movie could have benefitted from less time with the evil Dr. Arya.)

 

My Mom’s signature dessert is trifle.   Not too hard to make.   Some small pieces of ladyfingers (the yellow cake, not the vegetable) covered in a thin swipe of raspberry jam, spread in one layer across the bottom of the dish, then douse in sherry.   As the  Harveys Bristol Creme soaks in, prepare  some Birds Custard, then  cover the lady fingers with it, then cover that with whipped cream and a dash of sprinkles  to add some color and decoration.

That’s Priyadarshan’s  Chup chup ke.

The sodden bits at the bottom of this dessert are all the over-the-top, go-on-too-long slaptsick comedy bits with Rajpal Yadav and Paresh Rawal, the story is the middle layer you barely notice, and the whipped cream on top is Shahid Kapoor, Kareena Kapoor, the set design, costumes and music.  

The story, an attempted comedy of errors,  revolves around Jeetu (Shahid Kapoor) who has run up a lot of debt and fakes his death so his family will receive insurance money and be able to settle it.   After throwing himself into the ocean, he lands up the next day in a fisherman’s net.   The fisherman (Rawal) and his sidekick (Yadav) see a list of debts to be paid and mistakenly think it’s a list of money owed to Jeetu and they reason that by helping him, they’ll be well rewarded.   Jeetu pretends to be deaf and mute so as not to reveal who he is.   The three end up at the house of a wealthy Gujurati businessman, Prabhat Singh Chauhan (Om Puri),  who has just seized  Paresh Rawal’s boat because he’s owed money.   It’s  also the home of Shruti (Kareena Kapoor), who really is mute, though  not deaf.   And  then there’s secrets, people lying to protect others, and all sorts of confusions and twists, but it’s really not  worth enumerating here.   Jeetu and Shruti fall  in love, overcome some obstacles, and well, you know the rest.

 

Ninety percent of the action takes place inside the home compound of Prabhat Singh Chauhan, and whoever designed the sets has a great eye for warm colors and pretty touches, ditto the costume designer.   Everyone in the household, even the servants, look crisp and clean and matching-matching the whole way through.   Having read some unfavorable reviews this afternoon, I was surprised to find that the first half went by quickly, but there were no good songs until the second half, and then, they all came one on top of the other.   That said, the picturizations for Dil Vich Lagya and Ghoomar were the stuff of what makes  typical modern Bollywood movies what they are.   An ensemble cast in beautiful pastel costumes dance energetically to celebrate the engagement and the wedding (think the opening number of Bluffmaster or Shava Shava from K3G).   They were true feel-good moments but they came too late.

I have never been even remotely curious to see Shahid Kapoor on screen.   His babyface made even watching him almost seem like  pedophilia.   And his girlfriend’s air of smug arrogance was a total turn-off.  

But I have to admit, the 25-year-old Shahid does have perfect hair, a fit  body and, most of all, an open, guileless, engaging face.   On top of that, he looks as if he’s giving it all he’s got when he dances.   If, as Abhishek did, he can grow out of the boyish gangliness, he may have a shot at making the A-list as he gets closer to 30.   One saving grace in  Chup Chup Ke comes from Kareena’s character being mute, meaning we are spared her cho  chweet voice, and yes, I will begrudglingly admit, she does have beautiful eyes and an appealing face.   Her clothes for the engagement and wedding scenes are Manish Malhotra’s creations and they are gorgeous; one, a fantastic pairing of pink and green, the other a warm  burnt orange,  each  finished with  gem-laden earrings and necklace.

See it or skip it?

Not worth the price of a $10 ticket, as enjoyable as the  dance numbers are.   This movie is really only for  die-hard Bebo or Shahid fans.  

 

Watching any movie requires some suspension of disbelief.   Mainstream Hindi movies usually require even more.   And in that way, I’m pretty tolerant when watching my Bombay-made fillums.   Whereas others would groan and roll their eyes, I soldier on, happily.   The second half of Fanaa pushes that envelope to the limit.

Visually, Fanaa could be a bookend to Hum Tum, also directed by Kunal Kohli.   The interiors are lovingly appointed.   The costumes are gorgeous.   Army boots in Srinagar give way to pastel salwars and girly shoes.   Zooni (Kajol) and her attractive gal pals are magazine perfect in their color-coordinated, Kashmiri tinged outfits against the sandy, ochre tones and Mughal arches of Delhi’s famous tourist sights.

Aamir Khan as the incorrigible cad Rehan is decked out – fittingly – in various hues of peacock greens and blues in the first half of the movie, always topped off by a matching scarf flung jauntily around his neck (one even looked like a Missoni).   In Fanaa, Rehan is the 40-year-old grup that Aamir Khan’s previous tapori incarnations in Rangeela and Ghulam would have become, had they gotten a few rough edges smoothed out and learned an awful lot of poetry.   One metrosexual touch perhaps too much was the thumb ring and the six bracelets.   (The New York Times’ Nathan Lee declared the actor “over-accessorized.”)

Fanaa is a pretty meringue to consume, until the Interval passes and the movie turns all Rang De Basanti on us and gets heavy.   The stunts were maybe not quite Hollywood or Hong Kong at their slickest best, but were, for the most part, o.k.

But in the emotionally wrenching moments, when one should have been in tears, or at least feeling a catch in the throat, I was as dry-eyed as if standing online at the supermarket.   Never mind shedding tears, there wasn’t even any welling (and this is from someone who can even get teary over TV ads at Christmas).

The story is centred around Zooni, the beautiful blind daughter of a loving Kashmiri couple (played by Kiron Kher and Rishi Kapoor), who has led a happy and protected  life with them, just as she sets off on her first trip ever away from home.   She is going to New Delhi to perform with a dance troupe on Republic Day at the Rashtrapati Bhavan (Dil Se anyone?).   Their chaperone, the foxy Lilette Dubey, arranges for a guided bus tour of the city before they get deep into rehearsals, and arre vah, here appears hamara Aamir, stretched out on the roof of the bus and spouting poetry as if he were reprising his role of Dil Nawaz in Earth / 1947.

We and the girls soon learn that Rehan is quite the studmuffin.   He and Zooni are drawn to each other, and after some intense days together, they fall in love and decide to get married.   When Zooni telephones her parents to tell them the good news, they step out of filmi stereotype and say “That’s great!   You have our blessings and we’re heading to Delhi right away to get you two married!”

(The Amitabh-Hema pairing in Baghban had a similar reaction, leading me to wonder if the increase of love marriages, and/or unions that are some mix of arranged and love matches in real life, have given some filmmakers pause before they script in the hitherto required blind parental opposition.)

The movie, especially the first half, will appeal to people who like hyper-romantic, airbrushed stories of films like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, but anyone who has relished the closer lean toward realism in some 21st century Bollywood releases   – like Satya and Company – will probably gag on this one.

Poland serves as a stand-in for the troubled northern territory, and seems realistic enough.   So Pavlovian is our response that the minute we see a man paddling a shikara across a body of water with mountains in the distance, we do as the girl next to me at the theater last night who said to her boyfriend during the opening credits: “Dal Lake.”

After a tragic and bittersweet denouement just before the Interval, the movie’s flight from reality really takes off.   We flash forward seven years, and see Zooni settled in rural Kashmir with her widowed father.   The picturesque wooden house where Zooni and Zulfi live actually looks so much like the dacha from Dr. Zhivago that I half expected to see Yuri and Lara appear at any moment.

And speaking of which, what in God’s name was Lara Dutta supposed to be?   A hooker?   A slutty  girl?   A flirt?

The biggest complaint people will have with the second half of Fanaa has to do with one central plot twist, where you keep asking yourself “How can she not know?!?”   It’s hard not to do a spit take when she says to Captain Ranjeev Singh “Sometimes you seem very familiar to me”, though there are some sweet scenes where the two meet cute and frolic in the snow, looking like they’re doing a photo shoot for an Esprit catalogue.   Equally frustrating is how, even when the partial truth is revealed to Zooni and her father, no real clear explanation is given for what happened seven years before.

The film does offer some sublime sensual moments that are real and go just far enough before crossing over into Clintonian lip-biting set pieces.   As they tour Delhi alone, Rehan leans in toward Zooni and, almost brushing her cheek with his lips, asks “What is my voice like?   And my fragrance?”   He takes her to a mosque and daubs her eyes with dripping rose petals that have been soaking in water that is believed to have healing powers.

As the couple enjoys their last few hours together in  Delhi over dinner on the terrace of Rehan’s apartment, it suddenly pours rain and, of course, Zooni  chooses to stay outside and enjoy it.   It’s  funny  to see how  Aamir Khan’s ears, no longer hidden by his collar-length hair, stick out.   The song picturization comprises prolonged extreme close-ups of the couple as the water beads on their skin.   They spend the night together before Zooni has to catch the train home, and amazingly enough for a mainstream Bollywood movie, when she meets up with her girlfriends and chaperone at the station, there are no recriminations, just support.   The girls cradle Zooni in their arms as she cries inconsolably over leaving the man she loves behind.

Kajol, back on screen after several years’ absence playing the role of wife and mother, looks lovely and the camera lingers on her, over and over.   Thankfully the spastic mannerisms she brought to Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham are nowhere to be seen.   The only thing I don’t understand is, how can a girl from a country known for its threading still go around with that unibrow she’s had all these years?   Is this like Enrique Iglesias and his over-sized  beauty spot?   Is she afraid to remove it lest it affect her talent?

Kiron Kher has become the Nirupa Roy of our times, having done three splendid recent turns as a warm and loving Maa in Veer-Zaara, Rang De Basanti and now Fanaa.   She and Rishi Kapoor play a devoted couple who are such supportive and caring parents that you can actually believe their daughter just might say, as Zooni did when debating whether or not to go to Delhi, “I’ll do whatever you say.”

The music is entertaining, but just alright.   It lacks a melody or a hook that you’ll hear in your head for days after you leave the theater.   Mere Haath Mein is swoony and romantic, and Chanda Chamke is catchy, the first time I’ve heard a song that is nothing but tongue-twisters, but there’s no Chayya Chayya moment on the soundtrack.

See it or skip it?

See it, but be prepared to surrender and go along for the ride, or  be prepared to be frustrated.