Was Salman’s 2006 film Saawan: The Season Of Love as sloppy as Sikandar? Subhash K Jha examines this idea in a new installment of This Day That Year.
For all those Salmaniacs experiencing withdrawal symptoms after watching him in his latest film Sikandar, here is some negative consolation: Sawan: The Season Of Love released on April 7, 2006, is hands-down the worst film of Salman Khan’s career (So far, you never know about the next Friday).
After watching the film again for the sake of a memory-jog I wondered how Sawan Kumar Tak convinced Salman to be part of this. Agreed, Salman was going through the leanest phase of his career, with films like Phir Milenge, Dil Ne Jisse Apna Kaha, Lucky: No Time For Love, Kyon Ki, and Shaadi Karke Phans Gaya Yaar biting the dust.
Lekin, itni bhi kya majboori?
Sawan-Salman’s Saawan: The Season Of Love begins with Salman telling a girl, “You’ll die this Friday.”
No, that isn’t a trade pundit predicting doomsday for this hopelessly loopy and washed-out take on the vagaries of life. That’s just the desi Nostradamus, played by Salman Khan, predicting sure-death for the film’s pert heroine (Saloni Aswani).
The film’s feverish take on the matters of fate is so hopelessly out of sync with the times, you feel sorry for the perpetrators of this celluloid atrocity.
Poor Salman! He’s given the thankless task of shouldering this creative carcass. Not one word of dialogue, one frame in the composition of the shots, or one note in Aadesh Shrivastava’s music score serves as an incentive to stay put while Saawan Kumar (the Souten specialist) moves from the Other-Woman theme to the Shudder-Woman theme.
At some point in this blessedly short piece of karmic junk, Salman smirks, “Why do you treat me like Einstein?”
Er, fortune-telling and Einstein? A bit far-fetched. Every time Salman talks to ‘God,’ we see a cloud burst on the screen, which could be that popping sound in our head warning us to leave the theatre before the Friday calamity gets the better of us.
The series of songs in this supernatural bilge adds to the feeling of a director who lost his way long ago.
This could well be Mr Sawan Kumar’s last film ever. It’s so deplorably devoid of a center that it makes the average Bhojpuri flick look like a Sanjay Leela Bhansali creation.
The two newcomers (seen earlier in Sawan Kumar’s Indo-Pak love story) struggle to look pristine in their plasticity. Salman, the backbone and the nerve centre of this brain-dead romance, looks more real. You can see the actor making a valiant effort to breathe life into the dead film. But it’s a losing battle.
The dialogues seem to be written on the back of chewing gum wrappings. The pop-philosophy is so laughable, you wonder why over-the-hill filmmakers don’t throw in their towels before they are asked to get off.
The jovial Johnny Lever and the cross-dressed Bobby Darling try a bit of the funny stuff in this stiff-and-stolid tribute to the karmic cycle.
Salman’s character knows exactly when and where catastrophe is about to strike. Wish he had warned us.
