As Producer Salim Akhtar passes away, Subhash K Jha revisits Chand Sa Roshan Chehra.
Nothing about this film about Young Love is young. Jaded and utterly out of step with definitions and dimensions of courtship and romance in the new millennium, Chand Sa Roshan Chehra, released 20 years ago, directed by Shabah Shamsi As produced by Salim Akhtar, represents the most archaic and frozen face of Indian cinema.
In the pursuit to launch the debutant hero, producer Salim Akhtar’s nephew Samir Aftab, the writer Jalees Sherwani fills the plot with every conceivable cliché. Beginning with bachpan ka pyar (childhood attachment) that we’ve seen in puppy-love flicks like Anmol Ghadi and Betaab, the creaking groaning plot takes on the theme of hate-turned-into-love with a family feud, ala Romeo & Juliet, at its bulging backdrop.
What can you say about a film that begins with the juvenile little hero putting a mangalsutra and some sindoor on a girl old enough to be in the cradle?
Child marriage in a juvenile film on young love is the last thing we need. Like it or not, that’s what we get here. Prominent reference points from Mansoor Khan’s Qayamat Se Qayat Tak and Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (the young hero wooes and wins the girl from her headstrong father with the vocal support of his own dad, played by Ghazal singer Talat Aziz) crowd the film.
And just when you begin to wonder how the baggage of romantic history can be lugged to the end of this skidding falling careening piece of brain-dead balderdash, director Shahab Shamsi gets seriously ambitious: he introduces a whole track on Indo-Pak friendship when a young Pakistani girl Firdaus and her snarling brother come to the love-birds rescue in the eleventh hour.
Many sections of this half-shaped ode to teenybopper romance are mawkish and ineffectual. The Swiss backdrop only accentuates the utter vapidity of the cast, which is composed of veterans who growl into the camera with hungering hamminess. Himani Shivpuri plays a blonde music teacher of indeterminate origins named Miss Smith.
Rishi Kapoor’s nanny, Durga Khote, in Bobby, would find it hard to suppress her giggles at her character’s new avatar. In the climax, while the young lovers sing a defiant song to the girl’s dad, Kiran Kumar, Himani Shivpuri stands at the door making peace gestures to an audience that has long exited from this trivial teen-centric torture.
There’s a whole bunch of youngsters trying to ride the waves of glorified glitches that masquerade as cinema in this faded and jaded homage to young love.
The debutant hero Samir Aftab is clearly in the wrong business. Though he’s obviously trained to perform, he fails to convey the charm and screen presence of all the guitar-strumming debutantes, from Rishi Kapoor in Bobby to Hrithik Roshan in Kaho Naa… Pyar Hai.
Wonder why so much of the film industry’s precious resources are being wasted to project and promote people who have no business dragging mainstream Hindi cinema down to the floor.
In a fit of contemptuous rage, a character asks the hero if he has made Bobby since his name is Raj Kapoor.
“Jee nahin, I wasn’t born when Bobby was made,” retorts this new filmy and flimsy avatar of the archetypal romantic hero.
From Rishi Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia in Bobby to the callow young pair of this film….teenage romances sure have come to a sorry state. Let’s leave them behind as they sing yet another obtrusive Jatin-Lalit ballad, shall we?
