Booooooooo! The-man-who-can-do-no-evil has messed it up. Maane tu yaa maane naa, Ghajini is a step back for the man who made Taare Zameen Par. Aamir Khan, you didn’t need to do this. Especially not now. I hope Academy members don’t get a print or a copy of your new movie. Otherwise, they’re bound to have short-term memory loss about India’s chances at the Oscars this year.
Isn’t it ironic that the movie that changed the way movies were made in Hollywood has become a 180 minute showcase of primitive Bollywood movie making? The mother of all mind-blowers, Christopher Nolan’s cult classic Memento, has been reduced to a vegetable, a word they forgot to translate from the original. What hurts the most is not the inspiration but the total lack of intelligence of the script.
As unbelievable as it sounds, coming from the little big man, Ghajini is nothing more than a B-grade masala revenge drama from the 80s. The ones where the dying man whispers the villain’s name to the hero just before he disappears. Or where the flashback dissolved into the pages of a diary. Or where the villain and his jovial pot-haired men walked the streets with metal bars. In fact, there are so many of those bars that we wonder how one steel company didn’t make it to the brand linkage list.
Ghajini’s trump card is, of course, the Memento bit: Aamir’s Sanjay suffers from anterograde amnesia. He can remember things for only about 15 minutes and is reminded of this every 15 seconds. Yes, that is the main problem of the film. Not only does it simplify procedures, but it makes your audience dumb, explaining the same thing over and over again.
After all, Aamir couldn’t understand Memento! So what if the tattoos on his torso are turned upside down to be read in the mirror? So what if he walks around with a Polaroid camera to click snaps of people and give a personal caption for future reference? So what if he is avenging the death of his wife, he has a man to kill and is helped by another woman? So what if the only twist at the end is another Memento memory?
Yes, yes, Mr. Khan sweated until Mr. Brain became Mr. Body. But did he really need to? Maybe because of the promotion and marketing part, definitely not because of the movie. A little Uma Thurman could kill Bill and beat up his army. The roar in the “revenge rampage roar” should have come from within and not from those eight packs of abs. Aamir plays it in an exaggerated way, which suited Surya in the Tamil version, but he seems hysterical here.
No redeeming factor through the three hours? Yes, there is, and the name is Asin. We’ve had a couple of very good debuts this year in Prachi Desai and Anushka Sharma, but Asin is the best Bollywood find in a long, long time. His character’s catchphrase in the film reads, “Kalpana jadoo ki chhadi hai… Yun ghoomti hai aur sarkarein badal jaati hain.” I don’t know about the sarkars, but if Ghajini wants to stay afloat after the four-day bank holiday weekend, it has to be thanks to Asin.
In fact, Aamir-Asin’s romantic hint in the flashback is the only time you’ll find yourself laughing and smiling. Aamir, as a business tycoon, feels much more comfortable, but it is Asin who steals the show and gives the film its best moments: the first meeting with Aamir, the help for disabled children, the Ambassador sequence. She is refreshing, easy on the eyes, and an infectious bundle of energy.
Ghajini’s irony does not end with Memento. In his own way, he is the antithesis of Rabbi Ne Bana Di Jodi. There, the common man disguised himself as a cool guy to woo the girl. Here, the cool (and rich) guy dresses up as a common man to woo the girl. While Aamir’s everyman is nothing like SRK’s Suri experience, when the original chocolate boy hero says “I love you”, he still resonates most strongly in Bollywood.
Of course, he gets help from the best people in the business to express his love. AR Rahman and Prasoon Joshi meet once again with Behka, Guzarish and Kaise mujhe as passwords. Despite the South Indian feel, the extras strut their stuff in magenta jackets! – Ravi K. Chandran makes the songs look appealing, contrasting just enough with the very gloomy, very green revenge track.
That brings us to the title character. Pradeep Rawat plays Ghajini, the guy Sanjay has to “find and kill”. Unfortunately, Rawat (the Sikh pacer in Lagaan) does not deserve the honor. Even Sholay wasn’t called Gabbar. And here you have the old-school villain, with his rod fetish, mouthing silly lines (Piyush Mishra dialogue) under his breath and doing his best to look evil. Jiah Khan is the other casting misstep. She is so irritating that she often uses loud background music to drown out her lines.
Ghajini got a U/A certificate but it’s not a good idea to take the kids. Yes, most of the metal action is offscreen, but the bodies lying like something out of The Exorcist, their heads turned 360 degrees, don’t make for a pretty sight. The action (Peter Heines and Stun Siva) is practical, but after Bourne and now even Bond, it’s again a case of having seen it there.
Surely, most of you remember December 25. But don’t be surprised if within 15 minutes of leaving the theaters, they say, “Ghajini? What’s that?” Because as the glowing line in Memento says, “you can’t remember to forget” the movie.
