Film Review: Mausam

Nothing is more difficult for a writer than to write a review of a bad movie. It is so difficult to recall all the rubbish that’s there in the film to write one!

            Pankaj Kapoor’s ability as an actor does not need any vouching. He has been in Hindi cinema and TV for decades and has enthralled his audiences with some stellar performances. But he has failed miserably in his directorial début- Mausam. He has clearly overdone things with this one.

The movie starts on a promising note, and the plot seems set to burgeon into an exciting tale but alas, it fails to keep its grip on the audience. There are just too many twists and turns, most of them unnecessary and almost all of them too circumstantial to be believable. The writer has tried to encompass important events of the decade between 1992 and 2002 with the Ayodhya tragedy, the 1993 Bombay blast, the Kargil war of 1999, the 9/11 event of 2001, to finally the Gujarat riots. And during these ten years, the hero and the heroine, amidst everything, meet and separate n number of times, with confusions galore about each other and their families. And because all of the above events were to be included, none of them could be portrayed to satisfaction.

The film starts with the issue of terrorism in Kashmir, where the Kashmiri pundits are being driven out of the valley by the separatists. Aayat’s (Sonam Kapoor) father sends her to a village in Punjab from Kashmir to live with his sister (Supriya Pathak) to escape the situation in Kashmir, and also help his Kashmiri pundit friend Maharaj Singh (Anupam Kher) escape the terrorists. Shahid Kapoor (Harry) lives in this village, and when Aayat arrives, he is shown waiting for an important letter from the Govt of India. And while he is waiting, he just hangs out with his gang of friends, playing pranks on the village folk. Sonam and he see each other and they fall in love (obviously). While their courtship is just taking off, suddenly, Sonam departs from the village early one morning, on the beck and call of her father in Bombay. She is unable to inform Shahid who feels left out high and dry. In the meanwhile, the important letter arrives, which is the confirmation to his posting with the Indian Air force.

Cut to Scotland seven years later.. Shahid is there as a part of ‘Air-force’ exchange programme (God knows what that is), and Sonam is there too, as a part of a music group. How and when Sonam’s family reach Scotland from Bombay remains a mystery. They bump into each other (what a co-incidence) and find out that they still have the fire in them. And when they are set to get engaged / married, Shahid has to leave immediately for India as Kargil war has broken out. This time, Sonam is left high and dry. I wont bore you with any more of this, because the rest of the movie is full of such twists and turns where Shahid and Sonam are unable to even talk to each other for months together (Strange in the era of mobile phones), with they changing their locations from the village in Punjab, to Mumbai, to the USA, Switzeralnd, Scotland, and finally Ahmedabad.  Obviously, when one of the two is at a particular location, the other is not. Or, if they are in the same location, they fail to meet up, and if they do, there is confusion about Sonam’s martial status (Confusion, confusion!). Then there is a girl in the village who loves Shahid by herself (one way), and there is a distant cousin of Sonam, who she was once engaged to, in her childhood, that add to the misunderstandings. Further, to add to the drama, Shahid is shown to sustain a brachial plexus injury to his left arm following a crash landing of his bomber jet when he is returning from a successful bombing of enemy targets on Tiger hill. The arm is left fully paralyzed for some time, which is shown to recover in bits and pieces through the second half of the film. This is shown as one reason why Shahid avoids meeting Sonam for several months, as in how could he present his ‘incomplete self’ to his beloved (Drama, drama!). To top it all, and to rub salt on the audience’s wounds, his arm is shown to recover fully in an instant when he is trying to save a stranded child from atop an abandoned merry-go-round at a fair in Ahmedabad, which is now engulfed in riots. Can anything be more clichéd?!

In the end, finally, after many more of the kind of ‘filler sequences’ described above, they do marry each other. They have a girl child, whom Shahid is shown so predictably rushing gleefully from his bomber jet to hug (thank God it is not in slow motion), while Sonam watches happily pregnant with another one.

            The theme of the movie is good but Pankaj Kapoor and his writer failed to capitalize on it. Though they seem to rush through the important events of the decade in question, the movie is painfully slow and appears dragged. We actually waited for the interval.  

            Performances are just about ok, Shahid looks dashing in and out of the Air-force uniform (I mean in plain clothes, you silly), but Sonam disappoints with her looks. She looks emaciated, as if inflicted with tuberculosis. She looks ugly at places and since we know what make-up can do to women, I dare not catch Sonam without one! If Kareena was once upon a time size zero, Sonam in this movie is size minus 10. Her acting too has lots to desire. There are some new faces in the rest of the cast and they are nothing to write home about, either. Anupam Kher did not have long enough role to do justice to, and Supriya Pathak was as usual in the role of Sonam’s aunt.

The songs, done by Pritam, are the few bright spots. I liked ‘Rabba main to mar gaya oye..’ and ‘Poore se zara sa kum hain hum..’ sung very well by Rashid Khan.

My rating: 1.5 on 5