His clean-shaven chest and her new cool look with cropped hair did not save it
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His clean-shaven chest and her new cool look with cropped hair did not save it. Despite all its effort to mirror what young Indians think and feel, Anjana Anjani was a painful experience. While walking out of the theatre, the only question that I wanted to ask the director, Siddharth Anand, was: You really thought this is how we function? With movies like Salaam Namaste and similar ones hitting the multiplexes in the past years, it seems Bollywood wants to delve deeper and deeper into the hearts and minds of contemporary Indians.
But sadly, most of these films come across as superficial and half-baked understanding of Indian couples and their views on love and relationships.
Be it death or love, these recent movies seem to think that young urban Indians can deal with everything by shrugging, sipping on a beer, going to some night clubs and indulging in some never-have-done-before stuff. In Anjana Anjani, Aakash (Ranbir Kapoor) and Kiara (Priyanka Chopra) meet and try to jump off from the same bridge. But fail. In the course of the film, they try to commit suicide several times but do not succeed. At the end, you wish they had succeeded because then you would have been spared the torture of sitting through an inane travelogue presented as a film.
Even while wrapping cello tapes on each other's faces to die of suffocation, neither the script nor the actors emote any of the apprehensions, insecurity and fear associated with death. They behave as if covering human faces with plastic tape is something that they do every day.
Even in the matters of heart, the mantra for young professionals, according to Bollywood, is to Move On. Characters from these films come across as thoroughly confused, weak and commitment-phobic people who want to escape or else kill themselves, as they don't want to face real issues. Both ways, such films hardly end up being a reflection of what we think and believe. Instead, they come across as sorry remakes of Hollywood hits.
However, when it comes to sexuality, our directors seem to think twice. They don't mind Ranbir Kapoor doing a striptease but still want Priyanka Chopra to wake up all guilty in the morning with a did-we-have-sex expression.
With such portrayals, our actors dressed in designer clothes in exotic locations, look foolish. In an effort to match global culture and show that Indians are also cool, these movies end up being horrors that you would never want to watch again.
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