Janasheen (2003)
Cast: Feroz Khan, Fardeen Khan, Celina Jaitley
Director: Feroz Khan
Music Director: Anand Raaj Anand, Biddu
Synopsis: Appropriately released in time for the Turkey season!
Reviewed by: Faiz Khan

 

Feroz Khan makes a stunning return to the screen in what has to be, without a doubt, the biggest turkey of the year. So enamoured of his off-screen image as an ageing lothario perpetually accompanied by some glamorous young beauty, Feroz once again decides to transplant that persona onto the screen. The result is Janasheen, a hideous concoction that borrows liberally from all his previous films and stirs them into a cinematic goulash that proves far more ghoulish than appetising.

Janasheen opens with the age-old spectacle of two angelic children, all of six years old, apparently falling in love.

Lucky is packed off to Australia by his father, accompanied by his mother, who is suffering from cancer—although she herself has absolutely no idea that she is terminally ill. One naturally wonders how she is supposed to receive treatment in Australia without knowing she needs any. In any event, dear husband never even makes it there, while poor wife promptly dies, leaving young Lucky in the care of "Aunty Martha" (Archana Puran Singh).

Clearly, if she had no idea about her illness and hubby never turned up, she was always destined to kick the bucket.

Lucky (Fardeen Khan) grows up in Australia to become a successful motorcycle racer. Father and son remain estranged because Lucky believes his father abandoned his dying mother in favour of making money back in India.

Meanwhile, Father has been raising Jessica (Celina Jaitly), the daughter of a deceased neighbour. Jessica suffers from blurred vision yet somehow earns a living singing pop songs while simultaneously playing the violin at Father's nightclub, Angaara.

Her brother Max serves as the club's DJ, recently released from prison after murdering his abusive alcoholic father—the very man who had smashed Jessica's head into a mirror, thereby causing her impaired eyesight.

Naturally.

Then there is Tina, who looks as though she has wandered in straight from Mad Max, gyrating enthusiastically to Jessica's performances.

Jessica, of course, has never stopped pining for Lucky.

Into this glorious assortment of characters strolls Sabah Karim (Feroz Khan), a bald, ageing Afghan businessman sporting earrings and accompanied everywhere by his pet tiger. Sabah is obsessed with buying Angaara, but Lucky's father stubbornly refuses to sell it as though it were a priceless family heirloom.

Sabah responds in the only logical Bollywood fashion—he has Lucky's father murdered.

The killing is witnessed by Max and Tina, who conveniently photograph the entire incident, and by our blurred-vision heroine Jessica, who just happens to be crouching unseen in the back seat of the very same car occupied by the murderer.

The death is naturally ruled an accident.

Lucky returns to India, where he is reunited with Jessica after having briefly encountered her earlier in Australia, a meeting that somehow inspired him to burst into song inside a flower shop while an obliging Filipino assistant looked on approvingly.

Jessica, however, reveals nothing about the murder because she has been threatened that Lucky will be the next victim if she speaks.

As though matters were not already convoluted enough, another plot strand emerges.

Sabah Karim becomes extraordinarily fond of Lucky because he happens to be the exact double of Sabah's own son, who was killed in Afghanistan. For reasons that remain completely unfathomable, Lucky also develops an inexplicable affection for Sabah, treating him almost like a foster father.

At this stage, of course, Sabah has no idea that the man whose son he has taken under his wing is also the son of the man he murdered.

If this bewildering assortment of characters and paper-thin plotting is already enough to induce dizziness, don't worry—there is considerably more to come. Endless subplots, countless songs and increasingly ludicrous twists eventually stagger towards a thoroughly dreary climax that appears to end the proceedings.

Or so you think.

The monkey gets the final word.

And suddenly you realise that this is the finest joke in the entire film.

Feroz Khan has spent three hours making monkeys of his audience.

There are simply no two ways about it—Janasheen is atrocious. It wanders from one ridiculous situation to another, leaving one wondering why it was ever made in the first place.

Feroz Khan appears hopelessly trapped in the glories of his past. This film feels closest to Apradh, his 1970s outing with Mumtaz, where he modernised Bollywood by introducing motor racing, glamorous locations and heroines in hot pants.

Very little has changed.

Today, the motorcars have become motorcycles. The heroine now emerges from the sea in a bikini while playing the violin, before attempting to recreate Sridevi's celebrated Jaanbaaz dance moves amid swirling winds and dramatically billowing saris.

Every possible excuse is seized upon to display as much exposed flesh as circumstances permit.

For some viewers this may constitute glamour.

For everyone else, the obvious question remains:

Where is the story?

There really isn't one.

The film simply lumbers from one absurd situation to the next. When characters begin peeling masks off one another to reveal yet more people impersonating somebody else, it becomes painfully clear that the screenplay has completely run out of ideas.

Feroz Khan seems convinced that beautiful locations, glamorous women and songs appearing at random intervals are all that is required to sustain a feature film.

Sadly, they aren't.

As for the performances, Feroz Khan himself is unintentionally hilarious. It is impossible to take his character seriously, particularly when his faithful tiger Sheru accompanies him almost everywhere. In fact, I rather suspect that his ultimate downfall stems from abandoning poor Sheru when he flies off to Afghanistan.

The whole affair might have worked rather better had he simply reserved a seat for the tiger on the helicopter.

Fardeen Khan has never been worse. After a succession of disappointing films, this latest effort will do absolutely nothing for his career. We see far more of him in skimpy briefs and dreadful song sequences than we do anything remotely resembling an actual performance.

Celina Jaitly, on the other hand, lands upon an unexpected advantage.

Her dreadful acting blends so perfectly with the surrounding disaster that she somehow feels entirely at home within it.

The music is largely tedious. One or two songs possess a degree of appeal, but none is likely to linger in the memory for very long.

Surprisingly, despite being shot in Australia, the film never feels visually fresh. Familiar beaches, the same cemetery previously seen in Dil Chahta Hai's "Tanhaayee," and entirely uninspired action scenes rob the locations of any novelty.

Ultimately, Janasheen falls spectacularly short on every count.

It is so catastrophically bad that I found myself glued to my seat, waiting with genuine anticipation to discover just how much worse it could become.

On that score, at least, it never disappointed.