Review: Jannat
INNING IS EVERYTHING
Emraan Hashmi plays a match fixer in an uninvolving romantic drama set against the world of cricket.
MAY 18, 2008 - THERE’S USUALLY A BIT OF POETRY – dark, brooding poetry – in the way people fall in love in Mahesh Bhatt’s movies. The films themselves may be about gangsters and pornographers and prostitutes and others who’ve made their peace with the margins of society, but there’s nothing marginal about their emotions – and the most interesting thing about these films is how these tragic figures attempt to reconcile the baseness of their lives with the beatitude of their loves. We’ve seen this struggle over and over in Bhatt’s productions – in Gangster, in Awarapan, in Footpath – and you expect to see it again in Jannat, helmed by first-time director Kunal Deshmukh. But what we get, instead, is Arjun (Emraan Hashmi) smashing the display window of a jewellery store in order to retrieve a diamond ring for Zoya (Sonal Chauhan). He’s seen her admiring it, and he’s fallen for her at first sight – and this show-offy act of destruction is so that he can get her notice, and her name.
Forget dark, brooding poetry – this is more like parody, as if the filmmaker threw up his hands, grinned sheepishly and confessed to being really desperate about how to kick-start his love story. Just before this incident, we’ve seen Arjun at the gambling table, in a scene written to establish his character as an inveterate risk-taker. He keeps raising the stakes, resting his hopes on the ace and the king that he holds. But unfortunately, the third card is a jack, and after conceding defeat, he mumbles, “Zindagi mein queen nahin, is liye patte mein nahin aati,” that there’s no woman in his hand of cards because there’s none in his life. Perhaps it’s too much to hope that this woman, when she does appear, will walk into his life with some majesty – but does this moment have to be built around Arjun acting like the court jester? How could you take anything seriously after that?
Jannat is as serious as it gets – and yet, it doesn’t appear to take its central relationship seriously, and hence, it’s hard to take the film seriously. In the affecting Gangster, for instance, we knew Shiney Ahuja’s love was real because he was willing to give up a life of crime for his woman. If fate hadn’t interceded – as it always does, in these movies – they could have rebuilt for themselves an anonymous life in an anonymous country. Love, in that film, was an agent of transformation, a hope for redemption. Here, Arjun is the kind of person who won’t raise a finger to help when a loan shark is breaking the limbs of someone who owes money; he looks on coolly, munching on an apple. This is, of course, the “before” Arjun, and you keep waiting for a transformation after he falls in love with Zoya – but you get the feeling that the “after” Arjun would be an apple-muncher as well.
Over a series of hastily (and unconvincingly) staged scenes, Arjun becomes a bookie and a match fixer for a Cape Town-based don (Jawed Sheikh), and when Zoya discovers this truth – she thought he was just a businessman who imported and exported cricketing equipment – she asks him if he realises that the monies he earns for his boss are going towards funding terrorist activities. Arjun responds with a mighty shrug of his shoulders. So now that we’ve established that Arjun’s a fairly loathsome chap, that his sole purpose is to make money (and then make more money), and now that it appears that there’s very little in terms of an arc that his character is going to navigate – the way Shiney Ahuja’s did in Gangster (speaking of which, there’s a pre-interval development in Jannat, involving an apparent act of betrayal, that’s right out of that earlier film) – what’s our investment in what happens to him?
We still could have stayed invested in Arjun’s plight – if, indeed, lolling about in Cape Town with far too much money can be considered a “plight” – had Jannat made something interesting of the fact that he’s actually an addict. The film dredges up some psychobabble about childhood traumas – his chawl-residing parents used to avoid walking on streets where there were toy stores, lest their son asked for something they couldn’t afford – but these explanations are unnecessary. Some people are addicted to booze, some to drugs, some to power and women – and Arjun is addicted to easy money. That’s all there is to it, really. (And Arjun does have a point about Zoya’s hypocrisy, when he says that, for all her posturing about honesty and such, her face never fails to light up when his easy money buys her expensive things.)
But Emraan Hashmi is just not able to put this addiction – or this character – across. The way I saw it, Arjun needed to be a mix of wheedling charm and borderline menace and spluttering angst, and all we get is a slightly petulant, slightly cocky cad – and I couldn’t bring myself to care about the rest of his flatly staged story, which hinges on whether he’s able to give up his bad ways for the sake of his love. (Samir Kochar, playing a cop on Arjun’s trail, paints a far more interesting character in half the amount of screen time.) Pritam contributes some nice tunes, but how much can anyone do to prop up a movie with so little energy, and whose cricketing backdrop is so ridiculously tacked-on? When a player glances at the lovely limbs of a cheerleader, Arjun observes that not only is this sportsman a great fielder at the fine leg position, he’s also a great connoisseur of… fine legs. The rim shot to this purported punch line is sounded subsequently, when Arjun drags the cricketer to a nightclub and promises better sights: “Gully aur slip bhi nazar aayegi.”
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Are you sure Pritam’s “nice” tunes aren’t again just copies of obscure J-pop songs?
Oindri: Nope. And you’re right — you never know with Pritam. But that’s the thing with reviews. If you’ve already seen/heard the film/song that’s been lifted, you get all how-could-he and flustered, but if you haven’t, you just respond to the work in question. And sometimes that response is a “nice.”
The character arc that you mention is apt as when I saw it yesterday, I waited the whole second half for something more to happen to Arjun, some facet that was not there in the first half, redemption or a different sort of move towards salvation..but alas..nothing..actually even his love did not come across pretty forceful or true, so much paucity of character sketch and scene writing!!
Ah..Gangster, Sadak, Naam or even Awaarapan were better!!
Door Na Jana is an inspired tune:
http://www.itwofs.com/hindi-pritam.html
I was wondering if you have seen Ghajini (tamil version), and wondered whether you would class it as a remake/copy of Memento.
I personally wouldn’t. I think Ghajini is as much a copy of Memento as Karma (subhash ghai’s film) is a copy of Sholay.
I think it would be a shame if people went to watch Aamir Khan’s Ghajini with preconcieved notions and be disappointed, rather than judging it on its own merits
Indraneel: It’s been a while since I saw Naam. I wonder how it holds up, especially as I’m a big fan of Mahesh Bhatt of that period.
Ravi K: Ah, thanks. That’s, er, “nice” to know
Alpesh: Yes, I’ve seen it. The gimmick that drives the film is taken from Memento, but there’s a lot of desi padding around that. So I wouldn’t call it a “copy”. What is this about, by the way?
SPOILER WARNINGS (for all those who think that matters in a film like this)]
The script also features several farcical moments…one of my favs: terrorist/underworld kingpin Abu Ibrahim (played by Javed Sheikh) makes his money betting on cricket — but it never occurs to him that matches can be fixed until small time hoodlum Emraan Hashmi tells him! LMAO! The scene where this happens is priceless, you can see Sheikh staring at Hashmi, with the proverbial light bulb going off… simply hilarious!
Another great moment: Zoya loves Arjun (Hashmi) so much that she has him arrested so he can be reformed — and then starts working as an exotic dancer to make ends meet while he’s in jail, so they’ll have some money when he gets out… except she never bothers to keep up with him, and thus doesn’t even know when he’s released on bail (and continues working at this club until Hashmi randomly spots her)! LOL!
This film is so fake– Bhatt has no shame to go around likening this to Naam in any way, shape or form. I mean make what you want to make, but why pretend?
Other wonderfully farcical moments include the ones showing how Hashmi becomes a bookie. Apparently he knows nothing about cricket, nor is he fixing matches initially — he looks at a match on TV, screws his nose, and says sehwag will get out next ball…which of course he does! Once this happens a few times Hashmi’s got it made…LOL, who writes this drivel?
This is why Baradwaj is in a different league from the rest of us: imagine having to take this film seriously enough to write a full-fledged and even thoughtful piece on it!
I completely agree with Indraneel that Awaarapan (a much better frame of reference for this film) was better than Jannat. Jannat wasn’t “bad” in the way that Aap ka Suroor is, just mind-bogglingly, jaw-droppingly predictable.
Q: But you seem to be having a serious engagement with it youself
But in general, I found this predictable, as you say, not jaw-droppingly awful — hence the “serious” tone of the review. I can’t believe it’s gotten so many postive notices, though. To each his own and all that, but still…
brangan: I read this and went back to re-read your Brood Awakening, because, for one “brooding poetry” provided a memory peg, and secondly, (re)examining it in the light of something that’s its polar opposite helped me better appreciate that “Mahesh Bhatt protege paying his mentor homage” angle you call attention to in Awaarapan. (Besides, I needed to take another look at its closing lines just so I can shake my head and smile and advance this theory: how that jinx of a last line may have brought you the zero-character-arc cliche collage that’s Jannat.)
I haven’t seen this one yet but presume we don’t have the “..with Emraan Hashmi, we wait for the point where his heroines are reduced to breathing through the nose” type attempts at asphyxiation (unfortunately for Hashmi, I know. So it’s only fair that he be allowed to channel some of his must-smother-with-a-smooch desperation into “smashing the display window of a jewellery store”). For if we did, then the movie would have been titled “Jahannum,” I think. Small mercies…
Now all the bird talk this week (yes, I’m counting Awaarapan’s “bird” metaphor as part of this week’s installment) reminds me of an Anne Lamott book I read several years back, “Bird By Bird.” It bored me for most part (because what I was really looking for was a memoir on the madness and magic of the writing life, not methods and mechanics), but its one redeeming facet was this central point she makes: “We may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and pay attention. A writer makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded.” I couldn’t agree with her more.