London Dreams

At the fag-end of a season of big-budget films (Aladin, Main aur Mrs Khanna, Blue, Acid Factory, Wanted) where you wondered at the smugness with which filmmakers insult the intelligent audience comes Vipul Shah’s London Dreams. I want to argue that London Dreams is different in that it tells an average story with a conviction and engages its “target” audience well. It is built on the popular, multi-starrer, 70’s films’ format and has no pretension to be world class cinema. The good Bombay films have always had their stories to tell in a robust manner, however simplistically.

London Dreams is the story of Arjun (Ajay Devgn) who has a passion for music and a single-minded devotion to it that borders on obsession. His only other emotional tie is his childhood friend Manjit or Manu (Salman Khan) who doesn’t want to grow up and makes light of his father’s attempts at giving him music lessons. Arjun’s dream is to succeed where his talented grandfather failed, and he devotes his life to this aim as he moves to London from his small Punjab village. His hard work and desperation for success make sure that he gets noticed and appreciated, and within no time he finds himself taking the first few steps towards his dreams. He brings Manu, who is wasting his time in the village, into his band only to make the life-shattering discovery of Manu’s genius. His jealousy and his heartbreak at the unfairness of it all is like that of a studious schoolboy, who toils away with the books the entire year and then watches the school truant walk away with the trophies at the end.

The film is touted to be ripoff of Milos Forman’s Oscar winning Amadeus and plots dosages from Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Abhimaan. Another regular trick in Bollywood films that presently goes without scrutiny, so the valid question is what you do with your ‘inspirations’. And London Dreams does a good job of theirs. The drama held well for me (except in a crucial scene at the Wembley stadium where it falters and almost creates an anti-climax). The film is full of classic Bollywood, broad-brushed, over-the-top dramatic tension that manage to keep the narrative together, with not much subtlety or complexities but that saves the audience from confustions and gives them a sound, palatable dose of their weekly cinema-fix.

I felt the recent Bollywood biggies should at least have strived to get to the standards that London Dreams achieves – story, plots and dialogues that have been (re)worked upon, heartfelt acting, a fair mix and match of characters and their setting and where the narrative moves at a steady, consistent pace. Ajay Devgn and Salman Khan are not exceptional actors, nor do they fit the age of start up pop singers (but when you are conditioned from having seen Rajendra Kumar, Manoj Kumar and Sunny paaji play college students when they were well in their 40s, you accept the need to cast big stars for the budget to be approved). Point is, once there the lead actors have gone all out to do a decent job. (Same can’t be said of Asin. She just fails to be the woman that both the intense Sagar and the eternal flirt Manu fall for.) Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s music seems toned down and only Khanabadosh and Barso Re manage to create some magic.

London Dreams is a robustly made, popular Bollywood drama that does not pretend to be otherwise.