Review : Just Married

Rating : Average (3.0/5)
Genre : All-in-one
Year : 2007
Running time : 3 hours 17 minutes
Director Meghna Gulzar
Cast : Fardeen Khan, Esha Deol, Satish Shah, Kiron Kher, Mukul Dev, Sadiya Siddiqui, Tarina Patel, Raj Zutshi, Perizad Zorabiyan, Bikram Saluja

JUST MARRIED (JM) : Sweet, simple and very average

Another movie with a bunch of people on a bus. And again all honey-mooners. Or almost. This did remind me of Honeymoon Travels, but HMTPL was so much more interesting. HMTPL had many stories running in parallel, each of them being equally important. JM, on the other hand, is focussed on one particular couple Abhay (Fardeen) and Ritika (Esha) and the others are just there to support them or make a point for the script.

Meghna Gulzar in her second directorial venture after “Filhaal”, in which she also tried to portray the sensitive side of an unusual story, tries to show us the bonding of two strangers after they’re married. So, Fardeen is the affable, ex-NRI Abhay, and Esha is the pretty Ritika Khanna. Both harbor doubts about the arranged marriage system, but have not the gumption to question their parents outright. Thus, the duo find themselves at the wedding Mandap, and off honey-mooning to Ooty soon after.

Since they are veritable strangers, there is awkwardness and reticence, mostly on Ritika’s part. In the film, she is supposed to be an educated (MA) girl holding down her first job. However, Ritika appeared to be what can only be described as painfully shy, something which I’d thought a job could cure you of (how do you work with people if you can’t even look them in the eye ?). The director seems to substitute shyness for awkwardness. And while I can understand the awkwardness, I wasn’t sure why Ritika was SUCH a shrinking violet.

Abhay’s character is a nice guy and all, and he’s making a real effort to allay Ritika’s fears, whatever they may be. But I’m thinking – what about the guy ? It’s his wedding too. Doesn’t he have qualms ? What about his feelings ? Ritika and Abhay should have an equal awkwardness so to speak. And they don’t. Once they get back from the honeymoon to the joint family home, I could think of Ritika’s burden as heavier (the whole “the woman must adjust” idea), but at the honeymoon, just the two of them – no kith and kin to cause trouble – it should have been a level playing field.

The film thus moves along, very, very slowly. In the middle it got boring and I almost gave up hope. My husband didn’t like it at all; he found Ritika and Abhay boring – as in boring characters. They weren’t really smart, or snappy, or even energetic. They had no bright ideas, they didn’t say much striking stuff. My take on that was that at that minute level, in the nitty-gritty of everyday lives, we are all boring people. But then, must you take the film down to that level, and should you be making a film that depicts that “boring-ness” ?

You can, theoretically. Will it work ? That’s sorta up in the air. But to do it so that it sticks in your audience’s head, and nobody can just wave it away as a simple little bit of fluff (which it is in JM) takes talent and/or vision. Which I’m not sure that Meghna, and Gulzar’s daughter she might well be, has at this point of time. Most people I know have actually either liked this film, or are indifferent to it. No-one thought it bad. It’s considered a simple story told simply. Not outstanding, not fantastic, not “oh my God what a movie it was”. Just simply that it was nice and that was all it was.

I do think that the supporting cast were all very competent, and that’s added considerable sparkle to a film that could have turned to be as dull as ditchwater. There was Sadiya Siddiqui and Mukul Dev as a newly-wed, urban, Muslim couple, Satish Shah and Kirron Kher as an older couple with many years of married life, Raj Zutshi and Tarina Patel as the American-born/NRI couple, and Perizad Zorabiyan and Bikram Saluja as the very-much-in-love couple. Kher and Shah were, as reputation suggests, very good. And Esha, in mannerisms and acting, is very much her mother’s daughter.

I do appreciate that we have now in Bollywood directors with varying sensibilities; our good fortune thus being that we now have a burgeoning “multiplex” genre – films that stray from the filmi-masala factory and tell different stories in ways yet unexplored in traditional Hindi cinema. Still not everyone that tries succeeds, and while Meghna Gulzar seems to be taking steps in the right direction, she isn’t yet there.

When she is, hopefully some time (soon) from now, we will surely have a much finer product than “Just Married”.