Looking back at What’s Your Raashee?, Subhash K Jha shines the spotlight on the film that saw Priyanka Chopra play 12 different characters, a look at the song which showcased all of them and took 22 hours to shoot, plus more insight into the film.
Ashutosh Gowariker’s What’s Your Raashee? which clocks 16 years on September 25, in which Priyanka Chopra co-starred with her then-boyfriend Harman was first offered to another real-life couple Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapoor. By the time the shooting started, the Kapoors had parted ways.
Priyanka Chopra plays twelve different characters, each representing a difference star-sign from the horoscope. This makes Priyanka the only actress in the world to have played so many characters. The closest that we come to such a massive bodycount for one actor is Sanjeev Kumar in Naya Din Nayi Raat. He played nine different characters. But what ensued on the sets of What’s Your Raashee? all of last week would count as a unique occurrence in the history of world cinema. Under the choreographic supervision of Raju Khan, Priyanka performed to a song that required her to bring all the twelve characters together in all their varying moods and personalities.
It was the toughest musical challenge of any actor’s career, requiring her to swing from mood to mood at the drop of a beat. Apparently, Priyanka wasn’t allowed breaks between shots, as this would have broken the rhythm of the twelve characters as captured in one line of vision. Priyanka shot with Raju Khan (who is Saroj Khan’s son) for 22 hours at a stretch. At times she couldn’t sit or take a breather for hours at a stretch. It was very important to get the continuity right. Otherwise, the character’s graph would’ve become lopsided. To dance and emote to a song in 12 different looks and makeup all at once is not an easy thing.
The outspoken Kareena revealed she was indeed supposed to do What’s Your Raashee?: “Yes, it was offered to me and Shahid Kapoor. I’d have loved to do another film with Shahid. But the dates were clashing with Karan’s film Kurbaan that Rensil D’Silva is directing with me and Saif.”
Kareena also clarifies that her opting out of What’s Your Rashee had nothing to do with her split with Shahid. “We’re professionals, all of us. Even if I’m working in a film with Saif in place of a film with Shahid we’re thorough professionals here in Philadelphia. There’s no time to party or go out or do any of the fun things. We’ve been shooting in a tube station in below-freezing temperature.”
There are enough heart-melting moments in this lengthy treatise on how not to go bride-hunting for money’s sake, to make Ashutosh Gowariker’s reputation as a filmmaker. His films constantly ventures into areas of filmmaking that seem at first commonplace but actually secrete the most valuable truths of life. We saw him make a resplendent virtue of simplicity in the storytelling in Swades where Gowariker said “go back home” to the NRI played by Shah Rukh Khan.
A lack of pretension and a thorough affinity to simplicity and grace in the narration imbue What’s Your Raashee? with shades of life done in the quirky satirical tones that completely reject obscure images and symbols. What’s Your Raashee? relates the episodic story of the NRI’s search for a bride in the easygoing rhythms of a folk tale set to a contemporary but unobtrusive beat. The director’s eye for detail is unmatchable. When a postman huffs and puffs up that dusty village-road to deliver a much-awaited birthday card to a rich nanaji (grandfather) from his favourite grandson in Chicago, the postman’s shirt is sweat-stained.
When the first of Yogesh’s wannabe brides, arguably the best of Priyanka’s 12 spectacular turns, walks in, her shoes seem to have been bought only hours ago.
Gowariker pitches the elemental tale at a satirical level. Some of the supporting characters – too broadly parochial to match the narrative’s mellow mood – needed to be toned down. Also, the whole subplot about the marriage broker’s (Darshan Zariwala) extra-marital affair and a bumbling detective on his trail needed to be edited out. Some of the music in the otherwise-interesting mix of acoustics and sporadic melody by debutant Sohail Sen is also a burden on the narrative.
But Yogesh’s bride-hunt never gets tedious, thanks to the unadorned interiors of the simple plot. The bride-encounters move from the poignant girl who frankly tells Yogesh she had sex with her neighbour to the satirical self-crowned yogini who gets horny on the flustered Yogesh to the unabashedly idealistic barefoot doctor who invites Yogesh to move from Chicago to the village to the satirical theatre actress who spews venom at the NRIs – each character brings her own little universe of flickering emotions and ideologies.
The film is the consummate post-date film. It tells us about what happens to the nice decent Gujarati boy Yogesh, played with heartwarming niceness and decency by Harman, when he meets 12 prospective brides.
How beautifully Priyanka balances every characters’ inner life in the swarming but serene paradigm of the plot creating for each of the 12 intended brides an inner life and an outer glow within a restricted time-span.
It’s an amazing achievement. Priyanka gives soul to all the 12 characters she plays. In the climactic song, she brings all of them together, quirks and mannerisms all on display in one unified flow of feelings and body-language. The actress achieves individuality for all her characters while giving the plot a homogenous flow.
