Subhash K Jha revisits Nikhil Advani’s Salaam-e-Ishq, which was released 18 years ago!
To be able to direct a film starring, hold your breath, Salman Khan, Priyanka Chopra, Vidya Balan, John Abraham, Anil Kapoor, Juhi Chawla, Akshaye Khanna, Govinda, etc etc for a sophomore director must have seemed like an ache-walk.
Recalls Nikhil, “It was a cakewalk. Every actor went out of the way to accommodate my film. Salman Khan and Priyanka Chopra were there for me, and they were not only in their segment. Govinda was like a dream. He was on the sets on the dot and embarrassingly apologetic if he was a few minutes late.”
In fact, initially, the second-time director – who made his debut with Kal Ho Naa Ho – was petrified about how to handle the vast cast. “No actor gave me any grief. To watch these actors before the camera was an amazing experience. I was like a child in a candy store, greedily wanting more and more. And you know what? These guys were more than willing to deliver. We shot in London, Australia, and Sri Lanka. I also shot all over north India and with Govinda and his South African co-star Shannon.”
Salaam-e-Ishq is a 6-episode 3.7, hour film that turns all the cliches of love, life, relationship, marriage, and yes, cinema on its head….
Love is a many-splendoured sting…. It takes a creator of Advani’s insouciant romanticism to grasp the episodic Hollywood romance Love Actually and turn it into a full-on celebration of the Great Bollywood Drama.
Salaam-e-Ishq is both a hefty homage and a tongue-in-cheek spoof on Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Bollywood But Were Too Ashamed To Seek.
It’s all here…the frightful conflicts of the heart (Muslim girl Vidya Balan loses memory and is nurtured back to health by Hindu boy John), the delicious sensuous twists and turns of a mid-life crisis (Anil Kapoor, a portrait of restraint, learns ballroom dancing from the trying-hard-to-be-sexy Anjana Sukhani in what’s a straight homage to Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez in Shall We Dance) , the wonderful cultural divide that fuels immense chemical compatibility between two mismatched souls (played with enormous warmth by Govinda and Sharon in an episode that tilts its toupee to Aamir Khan and Karisma Kapoor in Raja Hindustani, a Rajasthani couple in a joint family trying hard to make out (Sohail Khan and Isha Koppikar doing a version of Basu Chatterjee’s chawl-romance Piya Ka Ghar)… a commitment-phobic yuppy and his exasperated fiancée (now why do Akshaye Khanna and Ayesha Takia remind you of their roles in the Subhash Ghai comedy Shaadi Se Pehle?)….
Yup, Nikhil Advani’s breathless romp just gets you so revved-up with its roomy rhythms of unfettered romance you want to bathe in the aroma of the luscious lingering feelings as they permeate softly but strongly from characters who are largely under-written for optimum impact.
Yes, the Priyanka-Salman track (with a special voice appearance by Karan Johar) is broadly spoofy…but nevertheless spiffy. As the item girl and wannabe ‘tragedy queen’ Priyanka pulls out all stops. Now you see her as the consummate item bomb; now you see her as this made-over Dehra Dun girl who wants love instead of Karan Johar. Why should those two be mutually exclusive options? Why can’t a girl have love and career? Vidya Balan’s character has both …in ample measures. Until tragedy strikes their paradise.
If the Salman-Priyanka track is broad burlesque, John-Vidya is delicate and sensitive… John expresses a childlike ecstasy in his love for his love. After Vidya’s accident, the director cuts into happy moments from their past, like sumptuous bits of filling in a soft and carefully prepared sandwich.
The editor (Aarti Bajaj) uses the scissors gently but persuasively. Bits of songs, emotions, dialogues, and locales float in and out of the episodic narration to create unity in the dynamics of diversity.
Of course the film isn’t as defiantly episodic as Crash or Babel. Often, you feel Advani’s frantic search for a common ground among the various couples who inhabit his delectably vast kingdom of commitment in love and marriage.
There are moments of subdued drama and high cinema all through this lengthy parable on love which re-defines the time space and pace of the Romantic Comedy with considerable humour and grace. Sure, you may not come to love and trust every couple equally. But that’s the beauty of the fragmented narrative. It creates an equality of opportunities for characterization within unequal parameters of structure.
Acting-wise, the film is a storehouse of well-utilized opportunities for some of our biggest stars. John and Vidya look like the perfect made-for-each-other couple. Juhi Chawla has little to do. And yet she brings so much empathetic grace opposite Anil. Akshaye Khanna is in full form, creating a volume of unexpected havoc within the emotions served up at the broadest pitch of the boudoire comedy. Govinda, as the new-millennium Raju Hindustani, was engaging.
But Sohail Khan, as the horny bridegroom, is the best of the lot . Delectably cartoonish he invests a kinetic animation into a uni-dimensional role.
It isn’t as though every component in this jig that we saw fits in perfectly. Often the narrative is seen straining for effect. The dance numbers are way too elaborate and over-punctuated. Piyush Shah’s camera and Piya Raghunath’s artwork blend the colour and kitch of Karan Johar, Yash Chopra and Dharmesh Darshan in what could be taken as the formulistic equivalent of a tribute to the potboiler.
But the pot boils at a sensuous simmer. You love John when he tells his amnesiac soul mate that it doesn’t matter if she’s forgotten their past together; they still have a future together.
Hindi cinema has a past and a future. Salaam-e-Ishq strides both the worlds, and yet retains its balance.
