Subhash K Jha shines the light on Kitne Door… Kitne Paas , which starred Fardeen Khan and Amrita Arora, as it completes 23 years in another terrific edition of his This Day That Year column.
For whatever it may be worth, this is the best film that the prolific Gujarati-Hindi veteran moviemaker Mehul Kumar has made. After unleashing a blizzard of bloodied melodrama in films with names like Nafrat Ki Aandhi and Tiranga, Mehul Kumar goes young, soft, and sometimes subtle in Kitne Door… Kitne Paas ….Well, not quite subtle because his Gujarati melodramatic antecedents keep surfacing in the most unpleasant comic sequences that have us squirming in our seats.
But there’s evidence here of some poised writing as two young bubbly NRIs take off together from “America” (Australia is passed off as Trump-country in the film) to get into arranged marriages back home in India. On the way, they fight like Tom and Jerry-na through a series of misadventures until it’s parting time.
Though we’ve seen Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan do the travelling thing with zing in Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Mehul Kumar manages to make the sparring camaraderie between his two young protagonists Jatin (Fardeen Khan) and Karishma (Amrita Arora) sparkle and sizzle. The portions on the taxi from Delhi to Gujarat are especially entertaining.
Mehul Kumar works against some heavy odds, like a killingly cacophonic music score by Sanjeev-Darshan (who does a very false and noisy imitation of Laxmikant-Pyarelal’s songs), a singularly stiff and awkward leading man, and superfluous characters who crawl out of every nook and cranny. But he makes the couple look real dusty travellers on the road to a relationship.
Jatin and Karishma’s touristic responses to the North Indian heat and dust are highly amusing. When a cop asks Jatin for “chai–pani” (bribe), he replies, “No thanks, I don’t feel like it right now.” The ride on rickety taxis, overcrammed buses, and autorickrickshaws through the deserts of Rajasthan and the greenery of Gujarat is entertaining.
But that’s just about it. Once the pair reaches their respective destinations, the plot has nowhere else to go. Mehul Kumar delays the inevitable reunion of the love-struck pair through cheap stalling tactics. The second half is crammed with silly situations, high-pitched melodrama (including a prolonged father-daughter sequence that puts us off completely), and the most irksome comic interventions by television’s popular comedienne Ketaki Dave and Tiku Talsania.
Since the romantic banter between the lead pair is so frothy and amusing, there was little need to levitate the proceedings to such a ludicrous degree. Apart from Satish Shah, who’s quite amusing in his multi-roles as a cabbie in “America” (Australia) and his slew of illegitimate offspring in India, the rest of the comedians should have been cut out of the plot.
Sonali Kulkarni, so much a sore thumb in Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai, re-surfaces with predictable incongruity as Fardeen’s fiancee, to create some more amusement, though this time unintentional. She looks too mature to be the third angle of the puppy love triangle.
As for Fardeen Khan, he needs to loosen his facial muscles fast. He’s convincing only while expressing his amusement at the Indian diaspora, probably because these scenes allow him to be characteristically supercilious. Newcomer Amrita Arora steals every frame from Fardeen. Though she has a long way to go, she conveys a surprising on-camera fluency for a newcomer while emoting and dancing.
While director Mehul Kumar borrows a major chunk of the storytelling from Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, the climax, with balls of fire going up in the air all around a wedding mandap (talk about a fiery wedding!), is partially lifted from Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai with actor Ayub Khan encoring his role of the heroine’s enraged rejected suitor. The whole glamorously-stagey domestic ambience surrounding the two strangers who fall in love while travelling together, seems to duplicate Raj Kanwar’s Dhai Akshar Prem Ke. Small world, even when the filmmaker purports to go global.
For a spot of contemporaneity, Mehul Kumar insinuates a prologue where characters in India discuss the September 11 terrorist attack in the US and why the hero needs to return home for reasons of safety. Political correctness isn’t one of this faintly entertaining love story’s stronger points. A crackling energy between the two travelling companions is the film’s USP.
Ghazal singer Roop Kumar Rathod (the music composer Sanjeev-Darshan’s uncle) and his wife Sonali Rathod appear to sing their own duet on screen. And director Mehul Kumar shows up on screen in the first half to further enhance the film’s already over-laden head count.
