Subhash K Jha looks back at Shah Rukh Khan’s Kal Ho Naa Ho, directed by Karan Johar. The hit romantic drama, which was released in 2003, also starred Saif Ali Khan and Preity Zinta.
How do you tell the wind to stop blowing into trees that do not want to stir from their slumber? How do you stop Shah Rukh Khan from playing a do-gooder whose heart beats for the happiness of those around him? As Aman Mathur, lately arrived in New York with a heart so laden with love and compassion it may burst at the seams, Shah Rukh does another author-backed star turn that’s heroic without throwing fists of fury at his adversaries.
Not many mainstream Hindi films actually possess the perception power and panache to alter the way we look at motion picture entertainment.
Kal Ho Naa Ho dares to take cinema further than we’ve known it go in recent years. It would be an insult to designate the work as Hollywood-calibre. Why should we belittle our own rapidly changing standards and yardsticks of state-of-the-art entrertertainment by constantly looking westwards for approval?
Why not just say, Kal Ho Naa Ho is as cosmopolitan in its romatic appeal as any of romantic comedy from any part corner of the globe. Karan Johar’s largely original acutely nostalgic and yet pointedly modern, predominantly romantic screenplay creates a zigzag of emotions in the life of its dysfunctional characters without losing sight of the plot’s essence.
Every character is either on the verge of an emotional collapse, or getting there. From our heroine Naina (Preity Zinta), a tormented product of mixed parentage whose Punjabi-Catholic household in New York is a slice of sublimated sitcom, to Naina’s granny (Sushma Seth) and her two sisters (Kamini Khanna and Shoma Anand) who maul Lata Mangeshkar melodies like the 3 Stooges gone complete wrong…. the film travels across a counter-cultural hinterland in search of a new language of massy expression.
Characters bubble out of Johar and Advani’s simmering cauldron spreading an effervescence and exuberance in every frame.
The scenes are often cut like a sitcom. Naina on the New York pavement bumps into her roving-eyed best friend Rohit (Saif Ali Khan, doing a character who’s in many ways an extension of Dil Chahta Hai) introduces the audience to the character and then quickly “rewinds” the narrative to show Rohit’s casanova adventures just before she ran into him.
Or take that incredibly humorous slice of laugh when the film’s resident guardian-angel Aman coaches Rohit through a secret microphone on how to woo Naina….. here and elsewhere the audience is made an active part of the film’s quaint courting games
In crossing the conventional hurdles of narration with a fluent skip and a humorous hop, debutant director Nikhil Advani and his editor Sanjay Sankla yoke yummy and yet dissimilar genres and styles in a blend that bends rules and yet succeeds in being a cohesive and finely threaded universe comprising the most beloved elements of commercial cinema including of course the songs and dances.
Shankar-Ehasan-Loy’s score is as mellow as the Manhattan mornings that cinematographer Anil Mehta captures in shades of ravishing rusted-brown shades.
The narrative’s diffused elegance moves on two sharply defined planes. While on one level the film is a heightened sitcom (check out characters like the neighbourhood siren Lilette Dubey and her overweight pitiable yet cuddly kid-sister Dilnaaz Paul) on another level the narrative goes into the lightweight existential cinema of Frank Capra where characters ask themselves two vital questions. ‘Who am I? And why am I here?’ without losing the blithe-spirited quality in their lives.
We too ask these two vital questions when Aman suddenly airdrops into Naina and her family’s life. Who’s he? And why’s he suddenly playing guardian angel in all these dysfunctional lives? Advani’s cloistered climate of swiftly-moving emotions don’t allow us to question the film’s patent disregard for time passages, or for that matter the surfeit of ribald jokes, a lot of them centering on the Shah Rukh-Saif pair being taken to be gay by a scandalized Gujarati maid (Sulabha Arya).
Shah Rukh plays Aman as a doomed but ever-smiling angel. He wants to fly . But knows that fate has clipped his wings. As he waits for death, he fills his remaining time with happiness in other people’s lives. Naina learns to smile, her deeply wounded mother Jenny (Jaya Bachchan) overcomes her differences with her bullying mom-in-law, Rohit learns to say I do to Naina , and the overweight Swetoo learns to say I don’t to calories.
Yes, Shah Rukh’s character undoubtedly echoes Rajesh Khanna in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anand and Bawarchi. Except that the haloed heroics of Aman are far more self-glorifying. As usual the super-Khan gives his own special spin to the role. He’s prankish, puckish, charismatic and angelic. This is the largest larger-than-life character he has ever played.
Shah Rukh’s scenes with Jaya Bachchan exude the warmth of lived-in emotions. In a minuscule role she makes a deep impression as a woman in a foreign country trying desperately to keep her family from falling apart. Jaya gets amazing support from the rest of the cast who represent New York’s ethnic underbelly with rolicking pleasure. Farha Khan’s choreography and Shamista Roy’s art work are minimalist, to accentuate the bedrock of emotion that surfaces only in Shah Rukh’s convention-defying death sequence.
Saif Ali Khan is utterly in-sync with the dhokla-in-disneyland mood. His twinkle-eyed awkwardness goes well with the narrative. At times, like when Preity blurts out she loves Shah Rukh, Saif’s performance borders on brilliance.
Preity’s performance as the repressed Naina requires her to look prematurely devastated. She manages to stay remarkably in-character throughout (gauche dance movements and all) . In a few vital emotional sequences (such as the one on the riverside where she puts her hand on Shah Rukh’s heart to sob her own heart out) she could’ve taken her character a little further down the river of emotions.
The climax where Shah Rukh “gives away” Preity in marriage seems like a homage to Sanjay Bhansali’s Devdas. Then Shah Rukh asks the couple to touch his feet. Before they can do the kneed-full he bursts into a jokey smile. That just about sums up the film’s mood. The makers of Kal Ho Naa Ho love mainstream cinema enough to subvert its conventions effortlessly.
