We have another great installment of the series This Day That Year. This time, Subhash K Jha revisits Kya Yehi Pyar Hai, starting Ammesha Patel, Aftab Shivdasani, and Jackie Shroff, which released in 2002.
Though Kya Yehi Pyar Hai sounds like yet another syrupy song-filled romp in the ravines, it actually stretches its neck out by arguing against the cult of puppy love, which has taken over our films.
Aftab Shivdasani is well cast as a moony dude who relentlessly chases a disinterested dame (Amersha Patel, looking suitably disinterested) for four years, only to realize at the end of the prolonged courtship that the effort wasn’t worth his while. In a well-filmed seaside confrontation, the ice-maiden finally thaws, “I’m all yours.”
But the boy takes us by surprise by belatedly rationalizing that love shouldn’t be a be-all, end-all of a young man’s life. “Thousands of youngsters like me while away their crucial years chasing a dream called love,” Aftab preaches rather convincingly, thereby making a clean about-turn from the earlier love-ke-liye-saala-kuch-bhi karega attitude that governed all youthful passion in our films, from Bobby to Ek Duuje Ke Liye to Kaho Naa…Pyaar Hai.
Hats off to screenwriter Javed Siddique and director K. Murli Mohan Rao for making an effort to pull out the teenybopper romance from the stuporous rut into which it has got itself over the years. One wishes the film would’ve compounded its freshness with more of the same in the rest of the narrative.
In the last two years, the clothes that the young lovers wear, the words they mouth, the psychedelic colleges that they attend, and the choreographic exertions they undertake are near-identical in all the love stories. Kya Yehi Pyar Hai(KYPH) is no exception. Even the protagonist’s group of friends, played by Vrajesh Hirjee and company, are interchangeable in recent rock-and-roll romances.
The one department where KYPH scores extra points is the music. Peppy and pacy, dreamy and drippy, Sajid-Wajid’s constant outflow of songs enhances the narrative’s staying power and takes the trite episodes forward to a position of safe landing.
Somewhere in mid-courtship, the film takes a brave detour into Robert Wise’s West Side Story (remade recently as Josh) with street gangs clashing in front of the heroine’s house. Blessedly, this incendiary interlude is brief. Or we would have had to deal with a shriek beyond the romantic squeal.
The episodes leading to the climax just aren’t interesting enough to hold audiences’ attention. It’s tough to empathize with a ‘hero’ who spends all his time chasing and dreaming about a girl who doesn’t even look his way. Forget love at first sight—this is love at frost sight! The icy glances that the object of Rahul’s adorations throws at him could freeze an entire meat mart.
Ameesha’s frosty act is so apt that one wonders if she’s involved with her role of the unromantic bookworm (or rather, computer worm) or plain bored. Her elaborate makeup, topped by lips that always seem to be afraid to move lest the lipgloss gets smeared, belies the intended simplicity and sobriety of her character. Efforts to perk up her staid character in the songs by putting the leading lady in bathing costumes on Mauritius beaches are a rude reminder of how cleverly our cinema subverts the deceptive glorification of womanhood and objectifies the very gender it pretends to put on a pedestal.
Anupama Verma, as the spunky college tart who decides to bring the two seemingly incompatible love birds together, has some meaty dialogue. “Eventually, you’ll marry someone, or do you want to be Annie Besant or Mother Teresa? So why not marry the guy who loves you?” she reasons with the frozen female protagonist.
Ashish Vidyarthi, as Ameesha‘s brutal father, with his crude gestures and dialogues, goes way over the top. His psychotic character is evenly balanced out by Jackie Shroff’s quiet and noble role of Aftab’s paternal brother. In a film that thrives on thundering emotions, Jackie tries to introduce strands of subtlety into his uni-dimensional part. His traumatic death and its aftermath could have been handled less hysterically. But if one expects tact from director K. Murli Mohan Rao, one might as well expect a trained stage actor like Ashish Vidyarthi to exercise more self-control while playing inherently melodramatic parts such as the one in this film.
Though the production values aren’t outstanding, the film exudes a fair degree of technical competence. Chotta K. Naidu’s cinematography gives the goings-on a glossy texture, and never mind if the gloss is out of place in a film about characters who drive each other—and us—to despair.
“Love is not the heart of life; it’s part of life,” big brother Jackie Shroff tells his love-smitten sibling.
Says Aftab Shivadasani, “It’s a film that had a very deep message and some wonderful music that is so relevant even today. Had a great time working with Ameesha, Jackie dada and all the actors who really bonded at the time.”
