The film is rhythmless and somewhat dull, and you keep wondering why it all sounds like so much fun and yet there’s so little to enjoy. Shouldn’t we be able to laugh at people we also love unconditionally?īut all these ideas, all these layers, don’t come together satisfactorily. And how can we miss the refreshingly casual gay character, who’s allowed to be both a limp-wristed figure of fun (holding a very phallic gun, no less) and someone whose sexuality does not come in the way of his family’s loving him. From Kabhi Khushi Kabie Gham, we have the overweight “ugly duckling” blossoming into a swan (not as literally, though in that film, the boy transformed into… Hrithik Roshan) – and when a couple of ditzy girls see the castle for the first time, they squeal, “OMG! This is like K3G!” It’s a stretch, but you could also make a case that Alia’s father is in an unhappy marriage like the ones in Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna. Because Alia cannot sleep, her father gives her sheets of paper with sketches for dreams – these are but the oneiric equivalent of the letters the dead mother wrote to her daughter in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Shaandaar also nods in the direction of Bollywood’s fairy tales, the cinema of Karan Johar. We expect him to charge in on his horse and whisk Alia away, but there’s a hitch. Alia’s loving father (Pankaj Kapur, in a beautifully poised performance) tells her that one day she’ll find the prince of her dreams – or at least, a prince who will make her dream, a “ sulaane wala rajkumar.” He arrives in the form of Jagjinder Joginder (Shahid Kapoor, cruising through a part that asks nothing of him). (There’s a magical scene in which a deep sleep falls over the entire kingdom, even the animals.) And of course, there’s a prince. Alia, on the other hand, is Sleeping Beauty – rather, given her insomnia, she’s an un-sleeping beauty. The last Hindi film to so explicitly evoke children’s literature was Sachin Kundalkar’s Aiyyaa – Rani Mukerji’s heroine was Alice, the film was her wonderland. But there is a wicked witch (Sushma Seth), who’s killed when her “curse” rebounds. Alia has a stepmother, naturally, who, if not wicked, is utterly indifferent to her existence. The story centres on an orphan (Alia, played by Alia Bhatt) who, in the tradition of fairytale heroines, is in constant communion with nature – she speaks to that frog, the insects on her sweaters keep springing to life.
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There’s a castle, a frog, a coach carrying a cute pumpkin of a girl, a Cupid-like boy with a bow and arrow. I wrote in my review that it is “a sun-dappled fairy tale, with a line of fairy godmothers cherishing and protecting …” Now, we have Shaandaar, where the Brothers Grimm seem to have sat in on the screenwriting discussions. His earlier film, the pleasant enough though over-praised Queen, was one.
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When we say “fairy tale” in the context of a certain kind of narrative, we usually refer to the deliberate unrealness, the escapist-wish-fulfilment-happiness of it all – but Vikas Bahl seems to take the term literally.