Dharmesh Darshan’s Bewafaa which clocks 20 years on February 25, had it all. Great-looking star-cast, huge budget, and an interesting traditionally-bound plot inspired by B.R. Chopra’s bold and progressive 1960s drama Gumrah.
Director Dharmesh Darshan throws it all away….in one sweep of a stunning heap. At first, you are saddened by the sterile drama that he has created out of such a resourceful, potentially dramatic scenario. Then you’re filled with rage at the extravagant and sad waste of precious resources.
During the year when films like Page 3, Black and even a much-vilified film like Sins tries to take our cinema beyond the expected, Bewafaa tried to pull it back into the stone age….or shall I say the ‘stoned’ aged, since the director makes most of his charismatic cast and crew sleep-walk through their jobs.
Bewafaa leaves you with the dread of the dead. The postcard-pretty pictures that cinematographer W. B Rao shoots on asymmetrically spacious sets serve as a facsimile of flamboyance. The characters aren’t only dwarfed and diminished but are finally defeated and destroyed by the director’s dysfunctionally conceived equations between time and space.
Darshan’s directorial vision is purely from a decadent decade, possibly the l960s, when actors were made to stand against imposing backdrops to look ‘glamorous’. With definitions of grandeur and glamour mutating drastically, the director seems lost in the yawning spaces he creates to denote an affluent lifestyle. Instead, Bewafaa reeks of the poverty of demotivated plushness.
The plot, for those unfamiliar with Chopra’s Gumrah, is about the dilemma of a woman who must marry her widowed brother-in-law for the children’s sake. Mala Sinha heaved a hefty melodramatic life into her role. Kareena Kapoor, in the same role, is crippled by a script that wants her character to cheat on her husband and still come out smelling like plastic roses.
Where she needed to breathe fire, she simply stood in trendily designed saris, trying to fit into the wifely role that the plot had conceived for her.
It’s a losing battle. The director’s obsession with eye-catching surfaces gets in the way of the cast’s most honest wishes—whatever they might be. While Anil Kapoor, Kareena, and Akshay Kumar (playing Pati, patni, and dude) underplay at crucial points, Manoj Bajpayee and Shamita Shetty—playing an over-sexed under-brained corny, and horny couple—go so over-the-top,, they topple into the pretty abyss that Dharmesh Darshan creates out of his glossy imagination.
Also relegated to the abysmal contingency of vacuous glamour and disembodied content are a group of socialites (a favourite satirical target in Dharmesh Darshan’s cinema) played by the director’s favourite Navneet Nishan and a group of hen who walk the raunchy path to invoke more revulsion than wrath .
Sapped of all passion Bewafaa is a film about marriage and adultery without any sex. If Anurag Basu’s similarly plotted Murder made the adultress strip on camera Bewafaa goes the shudder way. All the characters stand stiffly in designer clothes that they don’t know how to get out of.
Scene after scene of potential warmth is frittered away in frozen languor. For a film about family ties and human relationships, no two persons (except Sushmita and Kareena in an early scene of sisterly bonding) seem to connect beyond the starchy formality of the temporal warmth shared by co-travellers in the executive class of a plane flying to the Antartica.
Scenes of purported familial warmth, such as the one where Kabir Bedi and his family dance in the drawing room, are so phony that they are funny. At the end, when Anjali (Kareena) lectures her lover Raja (Akshay) about how impossible it is for a mother to betray her children, you gawk at her rhetorical posturing.
Nowhere do we see her mothering and nurturing her dead sister’s twin girls –the reason why she marries her tight-lipped brother-in-law in the first place.
It’s not the characters; it’s the director’s obsession with surface tensions that destroys the plot’s inherent drama. Rather than focus on the various fascinating angles to human bonds and accompanying obligations , Dharmesh Darshan has chosen to make a sanitised, sexless, emotionless impotent self-important aimless and finally pointless Gumrah .
Cold at the heart, defrozen at the edges the drama falls apart long before the characters.
Every character and the songs they croon are designed to create an impression. In the absence of a spirited inner world Bewafaa fails to create any sympathy for the vivacious young girl forced to sacrifice love for family duties.
Promising on paper hollow in execution Bewafaa represents the worst , most damaging type of cinema in Bollywood. It feigns to uphold values pertaining to a desirable social structure while actually doing nothing more than courting corniness. Some eye-catching outdoor locations in Montreal and a whole sequence of spouse-cheating shots on Delhi’s metro rail do not justify the extravagant and criminal waste of talent.
In their introductory sequence we see Shamita Shetty sitting on Manoj Bajpayee’s lap as they converse with the shocked and bemused couple Anil Kapoor and Kareena Kapoor.
This is the closest Dharmesh Darshan’s lifeless film comes to experiencing human warmth . You have to seek feeling in the farce. Such is the karma of this doomed love triangle.
I recall Kareena Kapoor’s excitement on the eve of the release of this fiasco. “I think Bewafaa will be my Raja Hindustani. I’m totally transformed in the film. I wear only saris in Bewafaa. One can be a youth icon in a sari. The film is very contemporary in feel. It’s been beautifully shot in Canada and though it does address itself to issues such as the sanctity of marriage and family, it isn’t an old-fashioned film. I’ve never done a role like my Anjali in Bewafaa. It’s a complete Hindi cinema, the heroine’s role is an entire gamut of emotions. If I may say so, I’ve risen to the occasion.”
In these films audiences get to see my potential. I don’t want to do only candyfloss roles. Frankly, I don’t agonise over my characters. But when the camera is switched on I just do what comes naturally to me. I won’t allow myself to be typecast, that’s for sure. I want to do only films that would help me grow as an actress. When I agreed to do Hulchal, people said Priyadarshan’s comedies are very macho. But I wanted to work with him. I want to work with every talented director. Shyam Benegal has offered me a film. I’m still reading the script. The year starts with me playing mother to two children and wife to Anil Kapoor in Bewafaa. Soon after, I’ll be seen as a college student. The audience is with me. They know every role of mine is trying to pass on some message or the other. So many college students SMS me. They want to know what my next role would be. I’m definitely going to keep the young audience in my mind while accepting roles. I’m the only major actress who’s a part of the younger generation and yet play mature roles. I suppose filmmakers pay me my price because they think I’m worth it. Of course offbeat directors can’t afford my commercial price so I’m flexible with them,” adds Kareena
