Subhash K Jha in a This Day That Drivel feature revisits Jackky Bhagnani’s debut film Kal Kissne Dekha.
As a vehicle for Jackky Bhagnani’s aptitudes Kal Kissne Dekha, released on June 12, 2009 is a harmless, inoffensive sometimes-fun but never funny (in spite of concerted attempts at humour) vehicle. The writing skills displayed in young Bhagnani’s launch pad range from the intentionally funny to the abysmally tacky.
The eye-confectionary is innocuous as long as the simple boy with the innocent smile(with incredibly white over-decalcified teeth) and the campus female-brat fight it out through a primeval mating game interspersed with ‘cool’ songs and dances with enough colours to put a mammoth carnival to shame.
The serious stuff ends up being embarrassing in its clumsiness. Casting Rishi Kapoor as a college professor who moonlights as an explosive terrorist is a bomb of an idea. We know Kapoor is the last word is versatility. But you can’t have him smirking under makeup planting bombs randomly all over Mumbai.
Interpolating extremism in a college romance is an extremely careless thing to do. We can’t have terrorism as a potboiler- formula. Worse, we can’t have Riteish Deshmukh as a funny don bumbling all over shopping malls and dance floors with his army of two henchmen, one effeminate the other indeterminate. Both hugely annoying, like their boss.
The same is more or less true of the film. While director Vivek Sharma could wring a few moist-eyed scenes from his audience in his film about a friendly ghost Bhootnath the closest we come to any emotion while watching Kal Kisne Dekha is impatience.
It’s fine for an indulgent father to throw a party to introduce his son. But must we be invited as peering guests looking desperately for that fun spot in the proceedings where even the music is of the most unpalatable variety?
All said and done, the debutants are easy on the eyes. Vaishali Sawant is leggy and moves well to the screechy music. Jaccky Bhagnani conveys the earnestness of the boy next-door who will help an old lady across the street with a jig and a smile, hoping some producer is watching his good deed of the day.
Here’s a intersting fact about Kal Kissne Dekha, Jackky Bhagnani played a guy who can foretell the future and during the shooting a premonition saved him from sure death.
Bizarrely, Jacky played a guy who gets premonitions in his debut film.
It was a miraculous escape for Jacky Bhagnani, the son of Bollywood producer Vashu Bhagnani. Minutes after he stepped out of a van during shooting for Kal Kissne Dekha, the van exploded in a ball of flames.
How he managed to be outside the van when he was supposed to relax inside, was something Jacky was unable to find words to explain. “Five minutes more in the van, and the airconditioner would’ve exploded on my face and also on my two cousins who had come to visit me on location. We were all sitting in the van waiting for Rishi Kapoor to arrive as he had a night shoot with me. I don’t know what happened. I suddenly felt restless inside the van and then I sprang out of my chair and told my cousins to step out with me for a walk. A few minutes later, we heard a loud noise behind us. We turned and saw the whole van up in flames,” Jacky said in an interview after the incident happened in 2008.
Jacky claims he had a negative feeling for the van from the beginning. “I felt something wrong from the minute I stepped into the van. I told the unit to change my van. And they promised to do so the next day. But before that, this unheard-of catastrophe happened. I’ve never heard of an airconditioner exploding.”
