This chaand is full of craters. Review on Khoya Khoya Chand

I am a big Guru Dutt fan, though the last guru dutt movie I saw was aeons ago. I have seen his pyasa, kagaz ke phool and one of my favourite movie of all time - Sahib Biwi aur Ghulam and been enamoured by all three. Though I was too young to understand the movies I was still drawn towards it and it is only now that some of the haunting scenes make sense to me.

I am also a big fan of the heroines as epitomized by Nargis, Madhubala, Waheeda, Meena Kumari etc. There was a lot of gravity in their acting and a sense of empowerment about them which is rarely found in heroines hence mostly because since then the role of a heroine was greatly devalued.

Khoya Khoya Chaand(KKC) was a movie that was supposed to reflect a slice of that era. The promos certainly looked exciting with soha ali khan looking like a young Sharmila Tagore and the music was captivating to say the least with an easy old world charm to it that still felt contemporary and fresh. But as they say, do not judge a book by its cover and so once again I learnt for the umpteenth time never to judge a movie by its promos.

The movie starts of well but then looses steam quicjkly and ends up eulogising the very elements the movie had criticized earlier on.

The story is supposed to follow the rise and fall of Nikhat - Soha. But the movie distances itself so much from her character that we feel as if we are observing her story through a neighbours window where we see the motions of what goes on but never actually get to know what is happening and why. Also from what little I understood of the story, Nikhat's character comes across as a victim who keeps getting victimised over and over again first by her family, then her producers and hero and later to a certain extent by her lover. Finally her lover comes as the knight in shining armour to her rescue.

The story is so wrong firstly because heroines like Nargis, madhubala, Meena Kumari or Waheeda were never victims or rather they never embraced victimhood the way Nikhat in a masochist way embraces it. In many ways Nargis, Madhubala etc epitomised a heroine who had a say and a viewpoint unlike the dumb bimbos who later got paraded on as heroines by directors. Also these ladies lived their life not as victims but as their own person and are still remembered today as stalwarts.

One would also think that Idealisim, a sense of elitisim and optimisim was more rampant in that era since at that time we as a country was still young and the Britishers had only just left us. However none of these are conveyed in the movie which feels more contemporary with its money minded producers, slimy lead heros, superficially idealistic directors, divaish heroines etc.

Also the charcterizations of the lead actors remains very sketchy. Anurag Khasyap in his blog justifies this lack of character sketch by saying that each character is supposed to represent a broad range of charcaters, so the hero as epitomized by Rajat Kapoor is supposed to represent a Raj Kapoor to a Dilip Kumar. My only reaction on reading that was Huh? I know each man has a Ram and a Ravan in him but then it kind of gets confusing when that man has only Ram, Ravan, Vibhishan etc but no individuality of his own.

The acting surprisingly was also very lacklustre. Except for Sonya Jehan and Rajat Kapoor nobody else stood out.

Soha was the biggest disappointment of all and I believe the blame for it partly rests on the shoulder of the director. Soha unfortunately still does not have the screen presence or acting calibre to overcome the shortcomings of a script. Therefore she totally fails to convey her charcacter who is supposed to be this winsome beauty a la waheeda with a self destructive streak in her a la Meena Kumari. Unlike Sonya who manages to convey her Divaish and yet softer side to her character in her limited screen time, Soha with a much bigger screen time usually ended up looking like an aspiring star and not the big star she was supposed to be.

Shiney Ahuja with his self conscious dialogue delivery is slightly better off moreso because the director had fleshed out his character better.

Rajat Kapoor and Sonya Jehan were awesome. Sonya Jehan actually managed to convey an old world glamour to her looks and her attitude something which was sorely missing in Soha.

The others including Vinay Pathak were competent.

Finally at the end of the movie we are left as clueless as the director about that Golden era which this movie was supposed to be about.