Khoobsurat (1999)
Starring: Sanjay Dutt, Urmila Matondkar
Director: Sanjay Chhel
Synopsis: convoluted yarn unfortunately has more low points than highs.
Reviewed by: Faiz Khan

 

Sanjay Chhel made his name as a writer and, buoyed by that success, now steps behind the camera as director. In fact, he also takes credit for the story, screenplay and dialogues. The film opens with the caption: "It is simple to be difficult, it is difficult to be simple. It is simply difficult to be beautiful." Then the credits roll.

Ugh.

With such a preposterously pretentious beginning, even before the first scene has unfolded, I feared the film itself would follow in the same vein.

The good news is that it doesn't. It isn't pretentious, nor is it especially self-important.

Unfortunately, that is about the only praise I can lavish upon this rather lame effort.

Sanju (Sanjay Dutt) is a small-time crook who inadvertently causes a drug consignment belonging to gangster Gogi (Paresh Rawal) to be seized by the police. Gogi's loss amounts to Rs. 50 lakhs and, naturally enough, he expects Sanju to reimburse him. To ensure payment, he kidnaps a little girl from an orphanage and threatens her life unless Sanju comes up with the money.

Sanju's sidekick (Johnny Lever) recalls meeting an NRI at the airport—also named Sanju—who was due to stay with distant relatives in Mumbai. Since the real Sanju has entrusted Johnny with showing him around India for a month, our hero devises a plan: impersonate the NRI, move into the family's home, rob them and use the proceeds to rescue the kidnapped girl.

So far, it sounds fairly dreadful, but this merely serves as the set-up for the real story, which revolves around Sanju's relationship with the family.

The household welcomes him without the slightest suspicion.

"Yeh to Suman ka beta hai!"

No questions asked.

Before long he has become part of the family, solving everyone's problems. There is the neglected young girl, the crippled child, the widowed alcoholic father with an unmarried daughter, the long-suffering son saddled with a catty wife, the greedy son with a neglected wife, and finally the saintly grandmother and the permanently cantankerous grandfather.

Naturally, Sanju sets about putting everyone's lives in order.

Meanwhile, because the family desperately needs money, the brothers hatch a plan to marry off the shy and retiring Shivani (Urmila Matondkar) to a wealthy suitor. Sanju instead decides to transform Plain Jane into Sexy Shivani. His makeover consists of making her walk along ledges to build confidence, throwing away her spectacles and burning her self-help books on how to become sophisticated.

In the process, Shivani falls hopelessly in love with him.

Does Sanju reciprocate?

Well... he can't, can he?

To reveal any more would simply give away the remainder of the story, although it scarcely matters because every development is painfully predictable.

The film is supposedly a comedy, but it generates remarkably few laughs. A handful of the dialogues are mildly amusing and there are one or two pleasant scenes, yet the film never comes together as a satisfying whole. It feels wafer-thin, contrived and almost entirely devoid of charm.

The chief culprit is the screenplay. It stitches together isolated scenes without ever convincing us that they belong to the same story. Comparisons with Bawarchi are almost inevitable. Whether intentional or coincidental, the similarities merely highlight everything this film lacks. Hrishikesh Mukherjee's classic possessed warmth, wit and enormous charm. This film has precious little of any of them.

Even Jatin-Lalit's music disappoints. Apart from "Bahut Khoobsurat Ho", this ranks among their weakest scores in recent memory.

Talking of Bawarchi, does anyone else remember songs like "Mast Pavan Dole Re", "More Nainan Bahaye Neer" and "Tum Bin Jeevan"? Those were songs.

Sanjay Dutt, however, emerges with considerable credit. He is relaxed, charming and genuinely likeable throughout. In fact, he is far better here than he was in Haseena Maan Jayegi, perhaps because he is no longer competing with Govinda for attention. He injects a warmth and easy humour into Sanju that the screenplay itself struggles to provide.

Urmila Matondkar, on the other hand, is surprisingly colourless in what ought to have been the emotional centre of the film. Perhaps that is less her fault than the script's. Shivani is presented as painfully shy, yet we are given almost no convincing reason for her lack of confidence. We are told that her mother died in childbirth, but this appears to have had no lasting effect on either the family or Shivani herself.

This is certainly no Sharmila Tagore in Anupama—the silent, emotionally scarred heroine whose inner turmoil gave that film its depth.

But then, that would have required Sanjay Chhel to dig a little deeper.

Instead, he set out to make a light-hearted entertainer.

He has certainly made something light.

Unfortunately, he forgot to make it entertaining.

A major disappointment.