U Me aur Hum
CAST: Ajay Devgan, Kajol, Divya Dutta, Sumeet Raghvan, Isha Sharvani, Karan Khanna, Sachin Khedekar
Director: Ajay Devgan
Question: does Ajay Devgan pull it off? Answer: yes, he does, barring a few hiccups. The new kid on the directorial block gives us a heartfelt romance which dares to go beyond the candyfloss and the confetti. U Me aur Hum is about what happens when the deed is done, and the problems begin.
Pretty Pia (Kajol), waitressing on a luxury cruise liner, knocks holidaying psychiatrist Ajay (Ajay) for a six. He’s single and mingling with a bunch of friends, she’s busy burying unhappy memories of a messy past. He sets out to woo her. She resists. They do the salsa; she melts.
Thus ends the unremarkable first half, where both Ajay and Kajol look a tad lived-in to be doing the cutesy love-at-first-sight thing. Post-interval, the film takes us onto a road little traveled in Hindi cinema: Ajay learns that Pia is losing herself to Alzheimer’s, and that he is losing her, bit by brutal bit. That’s when the film comes to its own, and the newbie director shows an unexpected knack of filling in the deep, dark crevices of a crumbling relationship with things that we recognise, and empathise with.
Mrs and Mr Devgan underline the pain and joy in a long-term marriage, where commitment is key, and where pyar karna junoon hai, toh usko zindagi bhar nibhana usse bhi bada junoon. Too sugary? Yes. Too true? Totally. There are times when she goes over the top in her screechy Alzheimer-ed state, but he pulls her back from the brink, just in time, and we are back in the story again.
Devgan-the-director gets a lot of the other stuff right, especially with the casting of the two couples who play the best friends: Sumeet Raghavan is excellent, so is Divya Dutta (they are the estranged couple who re-discover each other). Isha and Karan are good too: she dances like a dream, and he is the kind of guy who refuses to take no for an answer (they are the ones who finally find each other). And he and his real-life wife, given their long practice, play well together.
Ignore this completely crass line, from receptionist to Dr Ajay: “sir, ek severe mental patient ka phone hai”. Overlook the excesses and the schmaltz. There are enough sparkling moments in U Me Aur Hum to keep you with it.
Krazzy 4
CAST: Irrfan, Arshad Warsi, Rajpal Yadav, Suresh Menon, Juhi Chawla, Rajat Kapoor
Director: Jaideep Sen
This seems to be Bollywood’s Let’s Celebrate Mental Health Week. The four characters that feature in Krazzy 4 sport a clutch of labels: obsessive compulsive disorder (Irrfan, who has a fetish for cleanliness), intermittent explosive disorder (Arshad, who starts slapping people and breaking tables when he’s angry), schizophrenia (Rajpal, a freedom fighter who thinks India is still ruled by the British), and selective mutism (Suresh , who doesn’t speak, wears red pants that stop at the knee, and a permanently puzzled ex-pression). Very impressive.
Much less impressive is what happens once the introductions are over. Taking the cue from all the hard work that’s gone into the labelling, we quickly get over first-time director Jaideep Sen calling his characters krazzy (they are not plain crazy, see). When the four of them, accompanied by their sensitive shrink (Juhi ) start singing soulful songs in the car on their way to Mumbai, we know that this is not an out-and-out comedy. As things progress, with the help of a kidnap, a terrorist, a corrupt cop, and an intrepid TV journalist, we discover that we are not meant to be laughing at the krazzies, but laughing with them, and brushing away a tear or too, along the way.
That’s the problem with this lavish Rakesh Roshan production, because it doesn’t quite know what it wants to be—cornball or syrup. All the references to Gandhiji (Rajpal’s track is full of mentions of azaadi, and the tiranga) make you think of Raju Hirani’s superb Munnabhai, but nothing in the film matches up. Despite a near-naked Rakhi Sawant, and a fully-dressed Shah Rukh, both strutting their stuff in a couple of item numbers, and sonny boy Hrithik ushering us out with some snazzy moves as the credits roll, Krazzy 4 is a bland concoction, good only for a few intermittent laughs.
