Jannat
Cast:
Emran Hashmi, Sonal Chauhan, Samir Kochar, Javed Shaikh, Vishal
Malhotra
Director:
Kunal Deshmukh
Ratings:
***
More, more, more...The motto of motorised materialism seems to
have overtaken contemporary life. Everyone wants the good things in life in the
shortest time possible. The acquisitive spirit has seldom been defined with such
economy of storytelling as in "Jannat".
Not surprisingly, a lot of Mahesh Bhatt's latest exposition on
the excesses of materialism is shot in shopping malls, expensive restaurants and
posh stadiums where money flows like unadulterated honey. And when our hero sees
the love of his life staring at a diamond ring he walks into the showroom and
breaks the display window.
Get what you want by force and forget those homilies that papa
preached at the dinner table about the virtues of honesty. "Honest money means
hard work and little reward," says a wry character in "Jannat". He's obviously
not read Ayn Rand.
Sanjay Masoom's scathing dialogues scamper across the film's
lush skyline to create a language of wannabes who would stop at nothing to get
that new villa on the Gold Coast.
Let's then applaud one more moral fable from Bhatt's sensible
stable.
"Jannat" tells us to waste not, want 'nought'...By all means
covet the zeroes on that pay cheque. But don't forget that if you run after the
zeroes your life ends up in the zero zone.
Forty years ago in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's "Satyakam" Dharmendra
had refused to succumb to all the temptations of materialism that were strewn in
his path to salvation. Lying dying of cancer, he's asked by his wife: "Finally
what do you have to say about your life of
integrity?"
"I've lived," Dharmendra says at the end of
"Satyakam".
Can Emran Hashmi (playing the small-time wheeler dealer who
turns into a cricket match-fixer, criminal and moral transgressor) turn around
before his gruesome death to say he has lived?
Yes, Arjun (Emran) has loved. At heart "Jannat" is a dark
tragic love story. While the girl's innocence and the man's corruptible
countenance resembles "Kalyug", the whole dilemma of the beloved being
instrumental in destroying the criminal hero echoes
"Gangster".
Both "Kalyug" and "Gangster" were superior in content and
treatment. Debutant director Kunal Deshmukh cannot escape the clichés on
existentialism that have come to surround Bhatt's cinema...the morally
conflicted Shakespeare-meets-James Hadley Chase hero, the independent-minded
strong and value-based heroine, the hero's trusted and loyal friend(Purab Kohli
in "Woh Lamhe", Shaad Randhawa in "Awaarapan", and now Vishal Malhotra), the
ideologue father whose principles are held up to ridicule until the hero
discovers the hard way that dad's remedies are the best to deal with ethical
ambivalence.
These lingering leitmotifs get a renewed, if not luminous, life
in every Bhatt production. But "Jannat" lacks the resonance and staying power of
some of Bhatt's earlier films about crime and punishment from "Naam" to
"Gangster".
Cleverly and cautiously Deshmukh's film brings in the cricket
element, which has audiences ignoring the pitfalls of rejuvenating Bhatt's
age-old iconoclasm. The stock footage of real-life cricket matches are used well
and sparingly in the plot. The stress, as ever in Bhatt's saga of our stressful
times, is on the clashing colliding crisscross of human
relationships.
Emran's father's sequence in his son's luxurious bathroom where
he comments on the basket of soaps is a whammer. But the wheeling dealing in the
greenroom and clubs with cricketers of indeterminate nationality behaving like
debauched goblins smacks of amteurishness. The murder of the Australian coach
turns the Bob Woolmer scandal into a climactic add-on. May his soul rest in
peace.
But what stays is the protagonist's passion for money as
opposed to his love for Zoya(Sonal Chauhan). The end-game where the engagement
ring is juxtaposed against the gun is arresting in more ways than one.
While Emran interprets the over-reaching get-rich-quick
schemer's part with a native cunning, one misses that suave and smooth
transitions in the character that perhaps a Naseeruddin Shah or even a Shahid
Kapoor would bring on the table.
But Emran is charming enough to let the protagonist's journey
from a chawl to Cape Town look interesting. He's constantly getting
author-backed roles of the angst-ridden social outcast (a garage-sale version of
Amitabh Bachchan) which he plays with a fair amount of
sensitivity.
Debutant Sonal has much more to do than be the decorative doll
she seems equipped to be. She's the weakest link in the powerplay where the
politics of the playing field is extended to an engrossing exposition of greed
atonement. Some of the supporting cast, especially Jawed Shaikh as the
cricketing don and Abhimanyu as his silent henchman, come to grips with their
characters better than you would expect in a film that has scant space for
anyone except the man who would be king.
