U, Me Aur Hum: The Mr & Mrs. Devgan Show
Genre: Drama
Director: Ajay Devgan
Cast: Ajay Devgan, Kajol, Divya Dutta
Storyline: A couple’s ‘Happily Everafter’ is interrupted when Alzheimer’s condition strikes.
Bottomline: Sucker for sentimentality? Try this.
“You know something?”
That phrase is used to punishing levels in this near-meandering melodrama littered with borrowed jokes and stolen moments from ‘The Notebook,’ ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ ‘50 First Dates,’ among other films you can’t remember because memory fails you.
Yet it all works strangely and comes together quite effectively in the second half. Largely because, even if the world of his constructed reality is borrowed from a different sensibility, Devgan seems to have taken its occupants from the real world. His characters are as real as they get in mainstream films.
They come up with the most inane commonplace comments about each other, even SMS jokes and moral-of-the-story email forwards. They bond like normal people do. They don’t always speak intelligently. They are flawed. There are no side-kicks. They are capable of making even the hero the butt of all jokes. And, they are comfortable singing out of tune.
No, this is not realistic cinema by a long shot. It is every bit the quintessential melodramatic Bollywood film employing larger-than-life devices in the story-telling and jumping genres quite comfortably. Be it the light-hearted split-screens that show the little boy as the villain of the piece or the comic flashback sequences exaggerated to make you smile, the wide-angle point of views, jump cuts or even the ghostly dissolves…
There’s this scene where the camera (Aseem Bajaj’s cinematography) jerkily establishes the mental health facility like the Ramsay Brothers would introduce their bhooth bungalow. Devgan seems to suggest that the inmates are living ghosts, sending a shiver down your spine. That’s because this is a point-of-view film where the camera slips into the shoes of different characters to make its point.
“Are you sending your husband to the facility to make life easy for you or him?” the shrink had asked his patient’s wife much earlier in the film. Now, here he was bringing his own wife to the facility, trying to avoid eye contact with the woman he had counseled. He feels helpless, ashamed, guilty, vulnerable, heavy and even understanding and empathetic.
As an actor, he’s brilliant.
As a filmmaker, even better.
A fine example unfolds (again in the second half) when the doctor hands him his newborn and adds that he’s not sure if the mother would even recognise the baby.
There’s no melodramatic response or a background score to heighten the mood before the cut. The director does not forget that the man is a doctor himself. Just a moment of thought, which, in no time melts into baby-talk and he fondly greets his newborn with a “Hi baby.”
Also, but for the climax, the rest of the melodrama is contained and surprisingly restrained, restricted to metaphors and visual cues. Sample: the drama of rain washing away memory, doors and windows employed as transition to signify blackouts, the lizard about to swallow its prey inter-cut with impending danger or the colour white to represent memory (déjà vu Black and an Alzheimer’s-afflicted Amitabh Bachchan walking around in a white room?).
Devgan is a thinking storyteller with a flair for the ‘answers first, questions later’ narrative technique, breaking linearity to deal with predictability, to infuse pace into an indulgently told story. He has absolutely no problem with long monologues affecting pace. He sets it up for all his actors to unleash their histrionics, giving them ample scope to pour their hearts out.
Kajol revels in her role with an unforgettably electrifying performance to match Devgan’s career-best. The couple is likely to walk away with a few awards and is finely complemented by a solid support cast in Divya Dutta, Isha Sharwani (fully utilised to flaunt acrobatic flair, salsa and cleavage), Sumeet Raghavan and Karran Khanna.
Ashwini Dhir’s lines (the ‘Office Office’ guy who made ‘One, Two, Three’ and also wrote the forgettable Krazzy 4) help quite a bit to keep the balance between the light-hearted feel-good and the heavy-duty drama but the You-know-something’s take a toll on you, more so if you’re watching it for the second time.
But, you know something? For a film that isn’t too original, ‘U, Me Aur Hum’ has a lot of heart.
Krazzy 4: Kakey Koshan Rtd.
Genre: Comedy
Director: Jaideep Sen
Cast: Irrfan Khan, Arshad Warsi, Rajpal Yadav, Suresh Menon, Juhi Chawla, Diya Mirza
Storyline: Four mentally ill friends need to rescue their doctor who has been kidnapped.
Bottomline: Gives Hindi cinema a bad name.
Kakey Koshan: I’m, er… recently retired…
Borat: You are a retard?
Kakey Koshan:Er… yes…
Borat: Er… physical or mental?
Kakey Koshan: RETIRED! I don’t work anymore… Except Krissh films.
Borat still doesn’t get it.
Kakey Koshan: STOPPED WORKING!
Borat: [quietly across the table] Is very good you allow retard to, er…make movie-film. But it is not success, you will be execute.
Yes, certainly, there was a noble idea somewhere in between all that making fun of the mentally ill and questioning the sanity of modern day society.
But thanks to the way it plays out, you desperately start praying for a regulation under which producers of such films can be sued.
Dearest trouble-makers, this is the kind of film that you should claim for ban on some grounds or the other. Here are a few charges you can press:
a. Mental Agony, Nausea & Trauma: This one’s good enough for a lawsuit. Only that the judge may hold you in contempt for showing it to the court just to prove a point. Besides, you will have to be in court during the screening. A second watch could leave you brain dead.
b. Tall Claims: For all the promos that promise a comedy, the funniest joke in the film is where Arshad Warsi asks Irrfan to hold his injured middle finger up so that the breeze will soothe it (Mr.Bean there done that?) only to send the wrong signals to the biker dude. The second funniest attempt at humour is when an obsessive-compulsive cleanliness-freak Irrfan tries rubbing off Rakhi Sawant’s trash stamp at the end of her item. There is no third joke in the film.
c. Mental Illness is not a joke: Political incorrectness is better than pretentious political correctness. You want us to laugh at these guys all through out the film and then expect us to take their preaching seriously and hope we shed a tear for them.
d. The Fancy-Dress ‘Gandhi’ who turns to violence: Yes, this film actually shows a man dressed as Gandhi slapping a patriot who falls at his feet. When he shows his other cheek, he gets slapped again. Yes, we’re supposed to see the irony… a man dressed up as Gandhi does not understand ideals of Ahimsa. But when you make a clown like Rajpal Yadav monkey around that it looks like he’s almost going to disrobe the man’s dhoti in public view, the man’s actions seem extremely justified.
e. Obscenity: Nope, we are not talking about Rakhi Sawant’s costume (When has she worn clothes anyway?). It’s not even half as obscene as the marketing hype and budget for this no-brainer. SRK does better dancing in the ‘Panchvi Pass’ commercials and Hrithik’s much-hyped item is a 90 second extension of the original commercial appearing during end credits.
f. Defamation: Rajat Kapoor, Irrfan Khan and Arshad Warsi should sue for defamation. The only reason they could’ve done this film is out of pressure of high expectations we have from them. They can’t do anything worse than this next, can they?
g. Death threats: That ‘To be continued’ at the end of the film hinting at a sequel… you must be joking right?
