Mushathon

Film: Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi
Director: Aditya Chopra
Cast: Shah Rukh Khan, Anushka Sharma, Vinay Pathak
Rating: *****
Running at: Inox (City Centre, Forum, Swabhumi)
Maybe Amritsar is all about quaint gullies and meticulously tended aangans. Maybe people do fall in love at first sight. Maybe small-town India is actually populated with people like Surinder Saini, who bumble their way to your heart. We will grant all these to Aditya Chopra. After all, in the sugar and candyfloss world of Yash Raj films, plausibility is a redundant word. But a wife failing to recognise her own husband after he shaves off his moustache and spikes his hair? Come on now Mr Chopra, you were not aiming at a MTV Fully Faltoo kind of spoof were you?
And that’s the problem with Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. The fact that it doesn’t know what exactly it is all about. Is it a poignant testimony to love and its ability to make us see beauty in the most ordinary things or is it a time-tested underdog-coming-out-on-top tale?
Actually, this two-movies-rolled-into-one, which clocks in at a little shy of three and a half hours, is of course mostly nonsense from start to finish. But then one doesn’t approach a movie from the creator of Mohabbatein looking for spiritual guidance or even for clues about how things really are here on Planet Earth. What Chopra serves up instead is a spiced up khichdi of the Merchant-Ivory film Householder and the Raj Kapoor classic Satyam Shivam Sundaram unencumbered by such workaday banalities as plausibility, character or logic. You want to roll your eyes, but by the end your wonderment at Chopra’s inextinguishable enthusiasm, starts to break you down and win you over.
Surinder (Shah Rukh Khan) is a nerdy middle-aged everydayman working for Punjab Power, who somehow lands up with a balika vadhu, Taani (Anushka Sharma is adequately chirpy) who lights up his life like a CFL bulb. Before the feminist in you cries yourself hoarse, let it be stated that the girl is an adult and marries him out of her own free will. Now, Surinder might be a nerd but he is most definitely not daft. A few days into the marriage, and he knows that he has to change himself drastically to appeal to his nubile wife. So, off goes the uncomely moustache and out comes the skin-tight t-shirts. Post makeover Shah Rukh is unrecognizable we are supposed to believe, so much so that even his wife can’t recognize him. Thus, we have a Satyam Shivam Sundaram-like situation where Shah Rukh assumes a snazzier identity to woo his lady love.
It’s sad really. Even a decade ago showmen like Chopra could concoct a shamelessly mythic romantic epic out of mush and call it Dil To Pagal Hai. Those days, thankfully, are gone forever. Today, a mush-epic like Rab Ne… must come packaged as “a love story with a difference”.