Cast: Ranbir Kapoor, Deepika

Padukone, Bipasha Basu,

Minissha Lamba

Hindi cinema is changing. Bit by bit, but the pieces are adding up. After a live-in relationship set in Australia in “Salaam Namastey”, Bollywood makes bold to show one in our own Mumbai. Again it is from the same house, the same man. But there have been noises, feeble but audible from other quarters too. Just recently, Mallika Sherawat, that epitome of disdain for convention, swung merrily to “Main tally ho gayi”.

Now, here in Siddharth Anand’s film, the heroine takes a couple of steps further. We have Bipasha Basu, one of the three love interests of the hero Ranbir Kapoor, who lives on her own in Mumbai and wants to be an actress. Soon, the walls come down and the new age girl moves in with her boyfriend next door. Of course, she retains a modicum of tradition: see, she wants to marry him after all! But hey, the new age heroine has a mind, and not just a body, of her own. So, she wants to marry the man despite being told of his inability to have children. Ah, the winds of change!

Change from Mumbai to Australia, the wind assumes the form of a little gust. Here, Deepika Padukone, as an MBA student, drives a taxi by night, has an evening job of a counter salesgirl. All this to finance her own education. Goodbye to those stints of giving tuitions to the children of the villain, the way they did in the 1960s and 1970s. But hey, the more things change, the more they remain the same. So, we have Anand offering us a love story which has one hero and three heroines: poor Minissha Lamba brings up the third part of this all feminine triangle. And he gets Ranbir to reprise some of the roles his father made memorable in the 1970s.

What’s more, as a lover boy, Ranbir’s dialogue delivery, particularly in those high-pitched sequences, is very much like Papa Rishi. But he is sturdier, and in the long run, will just prove adept at things beyond romance too.

As the hero meets his first girl in Switzerland, it is back to good old times for the Yash Raj banner, the house that brought Switzerland to our drawing rooms. Then the hero goes hopping to Mumbai to meet his wannabe actress friend. Of course, it is to be succeeded by a trip Down Under for the third girl. The package is smart enough to keep the desi and the NRI crowd happy. As for the film, well, it is a steal. There is a nice momentum to things which does not allow you to think too much about issues of morality: the film is almost always in the realms of grey. The hero dumps one girl, then another. But along the way, the journey provides some exhilarating moments. And we get ample proof that here is a film, an urban film, that has its heart in the right place. And the director’s approach is focussed with his target audience clear in his mind. Watch “Bachna Ae Haseeno” with friends. Light at heart, breezy with the works, it is a nice hang-out zone for teenagers and those drawing their first salaries.

ZIYA US SALAM

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