Kabhi alvida na Kehna (trying to give a new meaning to love?)

So having heard much about this movie...namely bad, worse and much worse, me nd a couple of friends braved other warring units (read friends threatening to eat samosas by themselves...) to go watch this film!

And after watching the 3 and half hour movie..which with all due respect to Amitabh bacchan ought to have been an hour shorter, I have much to say about the movie. *so if you dont want to hear about the story..well stop reading now!*


First of all Amitabh's character was shocking by any standards...to see a sixty year old man prancing with 20 year somethings in and out of bedrooms is quite dispecable.
But lets brush his character aside.

The movie's premise seems to be that two very different people married to each other will find it difficult to make it work. Lets let that go too..
But I have to take offence to the main characters of the movie, Rani and Sharukh Khan.

Rani Mukherjee gets married to her childhood friend, knowing fully well (supposedly taking three years to make this decision) that she is not in love with him whereas he is passionately in love with him. So you have a couple of Rani and Abhishek where the issue seems to be that Rani is obsessed with cleaning and Abishek with night life.
But he is always shown to care a lot for his wife, where she is dispassionate and completely uninvolved in the marraige. At least some ounce of feeling for each other out of their childhood friendship seems to be in order. She never has an answer as to why she married Abhishek in the first place, and neither does the director apparently, which makes her character slightly shallow. Especially after she starts cheating on her apparently loving husband.

Shahrukh Khan on the other hand, plays this guy who is angry with the whole world because a car-hit ends his football (soccer) career. He ends up coaching little children and takes out his frustrations on his little son. So if you like him so far you would like him more when you see his obvious antipathy with a career oriented wife, who is doing much better than him in life. Priety Zinta is clearly at fault (with regards to the marriage) for being career oriented!

So these lost souls become friends in attempt to save their respective marraiges, end up falling in love and breaking their marraiges anyway!

The last hour is the saving grace in terms of acting and better drama. The movie has a few lively moments and several good lines.

I just wish that Karan Johar decided to make a movie which was out there in terms of social acceptance had decided to make his characters a little more credible.
Its not that people cannot possibly fall in love after being married but there have to be more genuine reasons. After all, we Indians pride ourselves with strong family bondages. Its true that no marraige should end being just a bag of compromises devoid of love. But when you decide to make a movie about this, your hero, heroine shouldn't come out looking like villans!

All in all...it was disappointing...NOT Because it was too long or BEcause it was too dramatic..but because the story just wasn't spelt out right!