In this edition of This Day That Year, Subhash K Jha revisits Tumse Achcha Kaun Hai which released 23 Years ago today.
Not to be confused with the Shammi Kapoor starrer of the same name, Tumse Achcha Kaun Hai was a fairly engaging watch that never got its due. Decency and good taste dribble out of Deepak Anand’s mildly diverting romantic musical. We may not think much of another coming-of-age film about an innocent rustic’s rise and fall in the Big Bad City. But Anand’s film conveys a certain artless charm that keeps us smiling to the very end, even if we know all along how the story of the innocent abroad is going to end finally.
Right from the time when Raj Kapoor made Shree 420, the theme of a migrant’s dreams in the city of concrete nightmares has fascinated mainstream Hindi filmmakers. Like RK’s treatise on the journey from innocence to corruption, which was later contemporized by Aziz Mirza in Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman and by Goldie Behl in Bas Itna Sa Khwab Hai, Tumse Achcha Kaun Hai brings our callow young aspiring singer Arjun Singh (newcomer Nakul Kapoor) to Mumbai where he encounters two women representing innocence and corruption.
Shree 420 had Nargis and Nadira epitomizing the hero’s journey from unselfconscious goodness to unknowing corruption. Juhi Chawla and Amrita Singh in Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman and Rani Mukherjee and Sushmita Sen in Bas Itna Sa Khwab Hai carried the theme forward on their capable shoulders.
In this latest avatar of the theme, newcomer Arati Chabria and the Mohabbatein girl Kim Sharma play the two polarized parts of women who influence and energize the protagonist’s success story. Neither actress conveys the subtle, seductive charms of the earlier films. Tumse Achcha Kaun Hai isn’t a film flaunting star power. Going back to the basics of filmmaking, Deepak Anand constructs a quaint, simple, and heartwarming morality tale where the real stars are the screenplay, songs, and the spoken word, in that order.
Apart from one lecherous music director, there are no evil characters in Deepak Anand’s film. Decent, God-fearing, hospitable people inhabit the film with a utopian determination. From his hometown in Jaisalmer where, Arjun bids his doting Bhaiyya and Bhabhi (Girija Shankar and Navni Parihar) a fond farewell to pursue the ‘Memsahib’ who visited his touristic town and his dreams in Mumbai (shades of the 1960s musical hit Jab Jab Phool Khile here) where a predictably helpful friend Monty (Raghuveer Yadav, wasted in an inconsequential part) takes Arjun to music companies and composers—the story of Arjun’s rise to fame is strewn with roses all the way, so much so that it becomes hard for the director to engineer a formal climactic conflict in the plot.
The character of Bobby (Kim Sharma) has been designed to bring on the requisite upheavals in this musical arcadia. Though an intrusion in every way, Sharma (with a part that’s inspired by Urmila Matondkar in Pyar Tune Kya Kiya) finally walks away with the film. That she has one of the best pairs of legs in showbiz certainly helps give her performance a brisk stride.
The two debut-making newcomers are painfully conscious of their performing duties. Nakul Kapoor is specially laboured. With a scrawny frame, a waistline that rivals that of his co-stars, and an eagerness to score performing points even in the simplest of scenes, his inconspicuous personality works to the script’s advantage.
If the film would have cast Hrithik Roshan as a wannabe pop star, it would have been impossible for the audience to follow the protagonist’s dreams. Among the rest of the performers Dalip Tahil (with his trademark baritone inexcusably dubbed by another voice) is delightfully overpowering as Bobby’s indulgent tycoon father.
Rati Agnihotri, looking not a day older than 35 (there’s a cute little dialogue about her deceptive looks where our innocent hero mistakes her to be the heroine’s sister), plays the mother of three daughters again after Yaadein. Her scenes within the all-female home where Arjun is adopted as a house guest exude a wonderfully designed warmth.
The sheer artlessness and naïve idealism of the characters and their dialogues gets on our nerves at times. But on the whole, Anand keeps us engrossed in Arjun’s zigzagging pursuit of his ambitions through a maze of dismissive music barons and indulgent friends. Technically sound, the film chooses to shoot on authentic locations in Rajasthan and Mumbai rather than create a tentative reality on studio sets. The stage performances celebrating the protagonist’s stardom lack the garish lavishness of earlier films about pop stardom like Disco Dancer and Star. But the songs and music by Nadeem Shravan are markedly more ear-friendly than in the earlier films. Songs like ‘Aankh hai bhari bhari’ and ‘Yeh un dino ki baat hai’ are melodiously motivated.
Inexcusably, the director makes the aspiring singer sing in the voices of at least four different playback singers. Consistency may not be one of this film’s great virtues. But Tumse Achcha Kaun Hai celebrates the age-old triumph of tenacity and talent over tribulations with a blithe-spirited transparency.
