Johar’s cinematic eye seems stuck in the land of Playboy videos, shampoo commercials and early MTV. The movie’s humor is deft enough to make you wonder why Mr. Bachchan and his father, Amitabh, who plays the same familial role in the film. And there is some droll banter between Mr. The director actually displays a fine comic touch in a series of ridiculous scenes: at a kiddie soccer match, in a bed store, at the opera. Johar, payback, perhaps, for Hollywood depictions of foreigners over the last century. The story takes place largely in New York, whose native inhabitants are often turned into buffoons by Mr. Mukherji’s eye makeup, which we get to observe in detail, is much better than Ms. Soon Dev is lovestruck, and who can blame him: Ms. He is unhappily married to Rhea (Preity Zinta) but meets the lovely Maya (Rani Mukherji), an ice princess whose husband (Abhishek Bachchan, son of the Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan) can never quite manage to defrost her. Shah Rukh Khan plays Dev, a rising soccer star who suffers a career-ending injury. If the marriage isn’t working, it says unmistakably, divorce is the answer.
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And the movie is a clear departure from the genre’s usual happily-ever-after. And those song-and-dance extravaganzas!įor something so silly and so long, however, the film is surprisingly engaging, thanks largely to its very watchable actors it’s easy to see why they are international stars in the world of Hindi films.
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It is full of big Bollywood stars and outsized everything: the rainstorms are a little rainier than real life the wind machines are cranked up an extra notch the close-ups get closer and linger longer than usual the coincidences that drive the plot are a little more numerous and unlikely than normal screenwriting allows. That is what the director Karan Johar serves up in “Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna” (“Never Say Goodbye”), a giant-size love story that aspires to be “Gone With the Wind” but without the Civil War.
But only in Bollywood would the standard-issue marital-infidelity tale include disco-style musical numbers and clock in at almost three and a half hours. An American one would probably end with a letter opener in someone’s back. A French version would have a lot more sex and cigarette smoking.