Auron Mein Kahaan Dum Tha Movie Review — Sucharita Tyagi
Film critiquing ki journey mein seekha, aur aap bhi jaanenge ki kya movie aap dekhna chaahte the uss ummeed par judge karna who movie joh eventually dekhi, galat hai.
I am going to break this rule in this review a little bit, but I’ll explain also toh suno end tak.
Ajay Devgn is an incarcerated man, Krishna, in prison for “double murder”, kisko maara aur kyun yeh mystery hai, par he is introduced as the most dangerous man in his barracks. As a pahalwan looking fellow walks up to him, khansaamas in the mess are like, yeh pahalwaan toh gaya aaj, murder hone waala hai. How someone who looks like Mr Devgn will manage that, we don’t know, but hopefully the film will explain.
On the outside, Tabu hain Vasudha, Krishna’s old love interest who one guesses was involved somehow with his crime, again how the film promises to reveal. She’s a very successful businesswoman who seemingly owns Fab India (the characters never say the company’s name, but she is shown taking meetings in a Fab India store and when work calls, call id flashes Fab).
Jail mein almost 25 saal baad Krishna chhootne waala hai, when Vasudha sees him, will old love come back to life? Why does Krishna not want to get out?
Ajay Devgn and Tabu together on screen are genuinely breathtaking. Their chemistry is so palpable. The actors are naturally relaxed in each other’s presence, heart beats in sync, and both their performances are delightfully understated and nuanced. The leading pair are so extremely watchable, that their presence adds depth to characters that the script often lacks.
Auron Mein Kahaan Dum Tha straight up suffers sabse pehle due to that clunky, mouthful of a title. Then comes the outdated, hyper-melodramatic treatment of the story by Neeraj Pandey himself. The underlay is underlaying, there is dhanan dhanan and symphonies and orchestra added in WAY too liberally, overshadowing any nuance the actors are trying to bring to the scenes. There’s an entire song where the two leads ke younger versions played by Saai Manjrekar and Shantanu Maheshwari simply stand on Marine Drive, looking at each other and crying. For the duration of the song. Yes, an entire song. The effect is tedious, stretching the emotional bandwidth of the audience thin. Empathy evoke karne ki jagah, mostly it tests your patience, making a case for watching movies at home with a fast-forward option.
The next stumbling block is the absurdity of what the film wants you to believe. That Shantanu Maheshwari in prison, went from being a geeky computer tech to most feared assassin during one crew cut and flashback montage. It’s giving “girl takes off glasses to become sexy”. As a grandiose and misplaced soundtrack crescendos while the screenplay remains stagnant, the film flip flops between wanting to be all the genres all at once. A crime — thriller sequence about a young girl who makes fake passports, another about a gangster who kept police waiting outside a temple in Bangkok, a comedy relief with a random white man announcing a promotion a little too complexly are a few examples of how overstuffed with un-necessary sidebars this film is.
Now to come to my original point from the opening of this review — if this film had a slightly light-handed treatment — Celine Song’s Past Lives, Avinash Arun’s Three Of Us — toned down Romeo Juliet jinki zindagi khatam nahi ho jaati agar pyaar mukammal nahi hota, they just simply move on, until an encounters brings back memories of a future that could have been. And if two actors can break our hearts into a million pieces, its Ajay and Tabu — a knowledge of how close their real-life bond also is helps draw you into the illusion. This promise becomes very visible in one of the final sequences of the film when the actors are allowed to stand on the very same marine drive where they once cried, except ab aadhi raat mein sadak khaali hai, shayad inke dilon ki tarah. Yes dramatic, but this one scene makes up for the severe lack of innovation in the rest of the film. The Parsi man with the bakery who main purpose is to say Dhikra Chokra has been a fixture in far too many Bollywood films na now?
So, on a scale of 1 to 10, Auron Mein Kahaan Dum Tha is……10 points to you agar bina google kiye, KASAM SE BINA GOOGLE KIYE poora sher aur shayar ka naam comments mein likh do.
