The Hindu : Karnataka News : Candyfloss romance

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Oct 28, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka

Candyfloss romance

Jab We Met (Hindi)

Cast: Kareena Kapoor,

Shahid Kapoor

Director: Imtiaz Ali

Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met will surprise many with its lasting good cheer and dispel many a myth: yes, Kareena Kapoor can act.

Yes, you can make a film without taking yourself too seriously. Some moments of genuine good spirit, some of little smiles, and they all add up to a film that drives away all gloom and doom.

What’s more, it partially retrieves the Punjabiyat lost to an avalanche of remixes and untamed bhangras.

It is that little heart warming film you never suspected was waiting for you.

The promos were all unbearably loud and Kareena seemed keen to keep pace.

But in a classic cinematic adaptation of never judging a book by its cover, the film proves better than its rushes. On the face of it, Ali’s is just another boy-met-girl, fell-in-love story, the kind Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol did with such elan in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge.

But Bollywood does more for propagating history than a hundred text books. And thank God for it.

Here too, the hero and the heroine meet – aboard a train from Mumbai to Delhi.

Shahid Kapoor – trying desperately to look older with rimless spectacles – is that rich guy who would have been extinct but for our cinema. He has never had to work for his goodies.

So, predictably, one day he trashes it all and boards a train. No idea of the journey, none of the destination. Just escapism, the privileged way.

Also there is Kareena, making a heavy weather of getting in. But once there, well, she is there.

She rules the frames, she calls the shots and gets into the skin of the character of a motor-mouthed Punjabi girl. She is on her way to Bhatinda with all romantic notions of eloping with her Prince Charming.

Jab We Met is the kind of candyfloss romance your sweetheart would enjoy. Pleasantly, it is also the kind of film you can drive a family down to watch.

Z.U.S

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