Subhash K Jha, in a new installment of his feature series, This Day That Year, looks back at Samir Karnik’s Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai and Vivek Oberoi’s Kyun! Ho Gaya Na… as it clocks 21 years. As a bonus, Vivek takes us inside his character and the making the film!
Kyun! Ho Gaya Na… is certainly posh in presentation. The sets (done in polished teak colours) and the outdoors (verdant greens barely hiding the blush on Rai’s romantic cheeks) are tonic to the eyes. And the choreography, especially in the Broadway-styled, “Pyar mein sau uljhane” number, is captivating.
If you stop and look at the gonna-be lovers as Arjun and Diya and not as Vivek Oberoi and Aishwarya Rai, you are likely to view things without pain and with mild pleasure.
This isn’t the first film to dwell on the gender war as seen through the eyes of two totally antithetical human beings. In Yash Chopra’s Dil To Pagal Hai Madhuri Dixit looked lovelorn and luminous as she waited for ideal love to strike her staid life.
Aishwarya Rai in Kyun! Ho Gaya Na… is a product of the Chopra-Dixit school of romantics. She gazes into a space that’s far beyond camera range. Dreamy and a bit spaced out, her character is a perfect foil to the unstoppable Arjun who treats life as an ongoing prank.
Not just Oberoi and Rai but also Oberoi and his screen-dad Om Puri share quite a few crisply written dialogues and moments. Check out the sequence where papa and son must wash dishes because it’s the domestic help’s evening out. It’s a giggle and a scream!
Or the sequence where the giddy-headed Diya imagines Arjun draping her swan-like neck with jewellery. The silken and silently rapturous progression of that sequence from high romance to a glorious guffaw (when Arjun finally breaks the spell with, “Don’t you ever bathe, or else why do you use so much perfume?”) is airy and effortless.
It’s the second-half that lets the actors and the audience down. Everything falls apart once Mr Bachchan appears on the scene. Playing a wickedly benign busybody all-purpose uncle to a brood of kids (including our resident Orphan Annie – Aishwarya), the mega-actor’s role in the plot is merely peripheral and redundant. Where you’d want the two lovers to sort out their differences on their own (like Saif and Rani did in Hum Tum) Uncle steps in with his boisterous bravado. Cupid never seemed more stupid.
The scenes with the kids meant to be cute, are acutely annoying. As Arjun struggles to overcome his reservations about romantic love you wish the narrative would give them space to obtain a romantic pace.
The rhythm of narration in the second-half is uneven and often pointless. Sequences such as Bachchan and Oberoi sharing drunken love-confidences or dance steps are a trifle irritating. Fate, you feel, is cruel to the lovers. But the script-writer is worse. While the lovers’ games in the first-half are wispy and likeable they do nothing but impair the narrative vision in the second-half.
Vivek Oberoi speaks to Subhash K Jha about Kyun! Ho Gaya Na…. “It wasn’t an out-and-out romantic film. It was more a fun film where I play an exuberant flamboyant character. It’s about two morally mismatched people. Aishwarya plays a romantic at heart. She has these crazy romantic notions about the perfect love and the perfect man who’d sweep her off her feet – Mills & Boon type. For my character, Karan, love is just not important. That makes him most unlike me (laughs). Interestingly, Karan wants an arranged marriage in Kyun… for practical reasons. She can’t understand how anyone can marry a stranger. So in the film we’re two completely incompatible creatures brought together by Mr Bachchan.”
Adding, “Let me also tell you, contrary to general belief this isn’t a film in the same genre as Hum Tum or When Harry Met Sally. It isn’t a boy-girl but a man-woman story. I’ve done a romantic film before. But Kyun! Ho Gaya Na… is more bubbly young and popcorn than Saathiya. It’s a less heavy film. The tone was always meant to be light and incandescent. I play a grownup who refuses to look at relationships with any seriousness. The couple in this film isn’t at loggerheads at all. They’re buddies with differing attitudes towards love. I loved my character because he gets to play pranks on Ash. But it’s done innocently. In real life too, I love my little jokes as long it doesn’t harm anybody.”
How difficult was it to enact the cynic when in real life Vivek was totally in love with the actress? “It wasn’t difficult at all. At the end of the day we’re all actors. I may be shown pumping bullets into someone. That doesn’t mean I’m really doing it. For me, it’s all about creating associations as an actor. Through those associations I build a world for my character. I imagined a world for my character Karan and then I worked on it. Besides Aishwarya, I had great fun working with Amitji, Om Puriji. All three have great comic timing. You’ll be surprised to see how young and vibrant Amitji is in the film. He’s such a pleasure to watch.”
