Pooja Bhatt’s Holiday, which was released on February 10, 2006, featured Dino Morea as a Salsa dancer. Dino Morea’s swan-like grace in the Salsa dancing, done with such precise and yet spontaneous élan, leaves us watching open-mouthed. Subhash K Jha revisits the film, and we hear from Dino Morea about a film he loved, Holiday.
Here’s an actor who has so far been wrongly, badly, or inadequately used. It’s a pleasure beyond measure to watch Dino do his ‘dirty’ dancing accompanied by some truly innovative music(Ranjit Barot) and choreography(Sandeep Soparkar).
For her second directorial venture, Pooja Bhatt has chosen a dream team. All her cast and crew conspire to create a Goan romance with a velvety Valentinian vibrancy. You can’t see Holiday qualifying for an Oscar nomination. But the gawky-chick-meets-graceful-dancer romance keeps a smile alive till the end. And that’s no small mercy!
When Dino, defiantly and devastatingly danceable to the end, gets on the floor to sweep the modern-day Cinderella off her feet, you know director Pooja Bhatt has achieved what she aimed to… make a soft, supple, sinewy love story where the boy and the girl express a lot of their emotions in elegant motions.
The Salsa dance, new to Hindi cinema, is a refreshing departure from the pelvic gyrations that double up for dancing in our films. The song-and-dance pieces are done with an audacious affection.
There’s nothing dirty about Dino’s dancing. He takes to the dance floor as though he’s to the rhythm born. He twirls and pirouettes across a brightly lit floor, creating ripples of romantic yearning with his hands and feet.
In one shimmering sequence, shot by the cinematographer in a vast bare expanse of dark whispering shadows, Dino’s hand stabs in the air, looking for the poetry of the spheres in the empty, vacant spaces that separate the workaday world from the world of feelings.
Some of the purported emotions are dissolved in getting the externalities right. The long, decisive sequence between Papa Gulshan Grover and his ugly-duckling daughter Muskaan (Onjoli) has no layering of lyricism to support the silent emotions that are supposed to pass between the estranged father and daughter. And the parental misunderstanding is too flimsy to be taken seriously.
You often miss that sense of a life under the surface. But as a boy-meets-girl flick, Holiday scores surprisingly high marks. Pooja Bhatt’s high aesthetic sense is evident in the songs and dances. Even the fun ‘n’ frolic beach song is done with lots of élan and verve.
Dil Nachta Hai?
However, the romantic moments aren’t fleshed out in any detail. At times, we see the couple interacting in frames that are cut predictably from boy to girl… and back to the boy without any space for the unexpected.
But once Dino gets to the dance floor, you can’t keep your eyes off his measured but spontaneous movements, his quietly intense eyes piercing the night.
The debutante Onjali Nair is aptly plain and unable to express the anguish of a heart waiting to flower into the folds of love. Whether her tentativeness is a virtue or not, we shall know at a later time.
Pooja Bhatt’s high aesthetic sense is given a twirling hand-up by Dino’s dancing and the Goan landscape. She has some fresh faces in the cast. There’s a nubile novelty even in the way the item girl Kashmira Shah is presented. Go watch the prince of the pirouette fall in love with the prim-and-prop-her Cinderella.
Speaking on his swan-like swoon dancing in Holday, Dino Morea, in an exclusive interview, says, “I am a dancer. I have rhythm in my body. When the music plays, I can shake and move to the beat. Well, having said that, I have always wanted to do a dance film, and then Pooja Bhatt came to me with the idea of Holiday, which was sort of a take on Dirty Dancing. I trained for about 8 months in Latin American dancing because that was the form we wanted to use in the film. I really worked my ass off for that. The elegant dancing was pretty elegant, and it turned out to be a sweet film, but I don’t know how many people actually saw it. I enjoyed the whole process of training and learning and being that dancer for the movie. But, like I said, it just makes you sad when not many people appreciate or watch your film after all that effort that goes in. But this is part of the process, and I am okay with it. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and like I said, I am a dancer. So, I was just dying to do a dance film at that point, and this came my way. Yeah, I loved it. It’s been wonderful. Those few months of training and shooting was absolutely wonderful. We had nice songs in the film too. In my opinion, it was a lovely-looking film. It had a fun story. Nice and light. Very watchable. I don’t know where it’s playing now though. If it’s on any platform or not. But, a fun journey nevertheless. Nineteen years, my God! Wow, time flies.”
