Om Shanti Om

Director: Farah Khan
Producer: Red Chillies Entertainment/ Gauri Khan
Cast: Shahrukh Khan, Deepika Padukone, Arjun Rampal, Shreyas Talpade, Kirron Kher

Choreographer turned director Farah Khan’s first venture Main Hoon Na came out in 2004 and was presented as a tribute to decades of Bollywood cinema. One could watch the film with amusement if one could muster enough forbearance for the director’s very passionate tribute to Bollywood. However, while her first film requested the audience’s indulgence, Farah Khan’s second film Om Shanti Om demands a greater sacrifice – of every bit of reason, intelligence and cinematic taste.

This film is about a junior artist Om (Shahrukh Khan) who along with his friend Pappu Master (Shreyas Talpade) dreams of making it big. He also adores the reigning heartthrob Shanti (Deepika Padukone) and risks his life to save her. But Shanti is secretly married to the villainous producer, Mukesh Mehra (Arjun Rampal) and is expecting his child. She wants to go public with the relationship which does not suit Mehra’s scheme of things, so he murders her. Om dies trying to save her. But he is born again (with the same face and gets to have the same name and profession!) and avenges Shanti’s death. He manages to have his revenge with support from a Shanti look-alike Sandy (Deepika) and assistance offered by Shanti’s ghost.

This incredulously contrived story takes awfully long to unfold. The first hour is spent in long pointless sequences that look like they were only meant to showcase the clothes, hairstyles and well-known plots and mannerisms of films from the 1970s. The shallow and juvenile antics of Om and Pappu Master fail to tingle and the in-between syrupy scenes of Om and his mother (Kirron Kher) are no threat to one’s emotional equilibrium. After interval, the film tries to make up for lost time but repeatedly gives in to the temptations for item numbers. It seems the director had so many films to pay ‘tribute’ to, so many sequences to borrow that she found it difficult to maintain coherence and reason.

Bollywood formula films have long had the audiences under their spell and Farah Khan is not the only one wishing to recreate the magic of the previous successful films. But while others take the short route and remake individual works like Sholay, Umrao Jaan, Don or Victoria No. 203, Khan tries to avoid any comparisons with any one particular film and instead borrows from a number of films (it will be interesting to create a list of the films where these ‘tributes’ come from). But the important question is – were the old formula films only about formulas? Why doesn’t the formula plot from the super-hit Karz work in Om Shanti Om? Or why doesn’t the star-studded song sequence borrowed from Naseeb recreate the magic? This could be so because the best of formula films were made with a lot of faith and conviction. So the plots were improbable but tight, the melodrama was heightened but not plastic. The masala was enlivened with a spirit that was particular to their age. Om Shanti Om borrows the form but fails to create the spirit.

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Om Shanti Om laughs at many Bollywood conventions, and yet uses these same conventions (without irony or self-consciousness) to structure and move itself. And it is in this particular sense that OSO lacks integrity. It artlessly and pointlessly puts together borrowed sequences and ideas and tries to pass it off as a tribute. This film is not a parody, for it lacks any meaningful criticism. The exaggeration of style and screenplay are not always meant to scoff at Bollywood formula films either. It is not even a fond imitation. The scenes cannot be homage to the popularity of this masala genre either, for they fail to create the magic of the original. The film could be a pastiche but for the fact that there is no logic to the borrowings, that it almost always falls short of both postmodernist intelligence and self-reflexivity.

It’s not only the film that tries to sell itself through its star Shahrukh Khan; Shahrukh too sells himself and his newly acquired six-pack abdomen through the film. Or what is the song sequence ‘dard-e-disco’ about? Despite the screenplay being single-mindedly dedicated to his character, Shahrukh does nothing new as far as acting is concerned, though one cannot fail to notice his lean looks and an effervescent & energized performance. Deepika Padukone doesn’t exactly dazzle with her performance but she is camera-friendly. Her studied movements and expressions tell you she has got the hang of things. Shreyas Talpade, as Pappu Master, does the expected as the hero’s side-kick (in recent years the mainstream actors have actively taken up the niche roles of vamps, villains and item number girls; now Shreyas, a mainstream actor, dons the role of hero’s side-kick!). There is no subtlety about Arjun Rampal villainous performance but that is perhaps taking a leaf out of how Bollywood villains are supposed to be. Kirron Kher has done better before but then such were her roles. A couple of songs in the film stand out especially the ‘dard-e-disco’ number, which has a very catchy tune with equally interesting lyrics. One only wishes it was not so forcefully placed in the film. Also, given the IQ quotient of the film, it was nothing less than a brilliant twist-in-the-end to have the ghost of Shanti appear and kill the villain (I was wearily expecting that Sandy too would be a reincarnation, of Shanti!). And there is this imaginative end credits sequence.

Behind the rich façade of a blockbuster film, Om Shanti Om is a lazy work, but a film that was nonetheless always assured of being a box office success (the previous review on Saawariya had noted with interest the failure of using time-tested Bollywood masala-mix approach to reach an assured success). Now that OSO is a success story, I can only hazard a theory on how such films do well (I will need several attempts to even come close to how the masala potion actually works) – audience need their dose of filmi entertainment, in which they need stars, and stars need to deliver the ‘masala’, which need to have all the ‘permitted and time-tested’ ingredients of high and low emotions, however delivered. And for receiving this prescription, the audience is only too happy to see the films for their moments, and move from one emotion to next, get their fill of laughter, horror, joy and sadness and somehow manage to put together the pieces of these absurdly incoherent films and arrange them in their subconscious into a one successful whole. In colluding with our filmmakers, our audience actually fulfill that great need of fiction cinema – to be able to suspend one’s disbelief. Only that our audience do it like no one or no where else in the world.