We have a new installment of Subhash K Jha’s fabulous series This Day That Year as he revisits Vikram Bhatt’s Life Mein Kabhie Kabhiee, which released in 2007 and featured Aftab Shivdasani, Dino Morea, Nauheed Cyrusi, Anjori Alagh, Nikita Anand, Sammir Dattani, Rajat Bedi, and Mohnish Bahl.
Vikram Bhatt’s best-scripted work to date is about the dreams and ambitions of the very young and not-so-young. Dreams die hard in Life Mein Kabhie Kabhiee(LMKK). As they fall with a thud to the ground, Vikram Bhatt, displaying a sensitivity seldom evident in his films, catches the tears and laughter and splashes them in this film about five friends and their scattered, shattered dreams.
The film moves into various strands. Manoj Tyagi’s screenplay weaves in and out these warm, lived-in lives with a dextrous flourish.
Like many of Bhatt’s works, LMKK is suffused with characters. Miraculously, they all seem to have a life even when Pravin Bhatt’s camera isn’t looking. Bhatt gives each of the five protagonists a reverberant existence that takes them beyond the stylized sets and clichéd locations (does a film on the young have to have happy songs on the beach and the pub? ). Sometimes, they go straight into our hearts, and sometimes, a little higher.
Even a seemingly minor sequence tends to take the narrative above the routine. Watch the sequence in the mall where Raj Zutshi’s first wife runs into his new plaything. “I can see from the shopping bags how happy you are,” says the first wife to the second.
Girish Dhamija’s outstanding dialogues reveal the continuity of the state of mind known as unhappiness.
Every character hurls towards his or her imagined happiness. But is finally looking into a yawning inertia echoing what Milan Kundera described as the unbearable lightness of being.
There’s Rajeev (Dino Morea), who breaks away from his straitlaced entrepreneur-brother (Mohnish Behl) to pave his own tortuous path to success. Mona (Nauheed Cyrusi) takes the easy route to stardom—the casting couch with a caddish leading man (Rajat Bedi) while the loving, supportive boyfriend (Anuj Sawhney, as dependable as a character as he’s as an actor ) languishes at home.
Then there’s Ishita (Anjori Alagh), who marries money (Raj Zutshi) only to look straight into the eyes of desolation.
And yes, Jai (Sammir Dattani), the troubled, tormented, guilt-stricken politician trying to find his way out of the dark, deep tunnel of self-recrimination.
Shivdasani, doing his cute eye-rolling, wide-eyed, goofy-grin act, is the one who holds the laughter in place in this aromatic ode to the scowl of life.
The plot seems outwardly a mass of unmanageable ideas. Thanks to some deftly written scenes dotted with dialogue that makes you sit up and listen, this segmented sighing, sobbing, giggling chirrup of chain reactions comes together with a sun ‘n’ shade virtuosity.
Yes, technically, the film needed a hand-up. Often, the project’s modest undertaking clearly shows up in the sets. Also, Pravin Bhatt’s cinematography is unable to create an even uni-view into the characters’ lives and loves.
Barring a few performers, the quality of acting conceals the technical leaps. From the tried and tested Raj Zutshi and Mohnish Behl to their contemporary counterparts like Dino Morea and Aftab Shivdasani, everyone gets into the skin of things. Newcomer Anjori Alagh has a complex gold-digger’s part. She is able. On the other hand, Nauheed Cyrusi looks as lost on the casting couch as she does off it. Sammir Dattani, playing what could be interpreted as a modern-day version of Sunny Deol in Rahul Rawail’s Arjun, proves to be a watchable actor.
Here is what Life Mein … tells us. Don’t create a labyrinth of regrets in your life. Live in the moment. But don’t fritter away the echoes of eternity that carry human aspirations from here to eternity.
