The theatrical artifice of the scenario literally makes you the fourth wall, as if you’re completing the three-dimensionality of the setting in front of you. And indeed, it is a show that follows – with roving spotlights, billowing red curtains and moving sets – as the flashback unfolds. (Even the way the title appears at the beginning is very Broadwayesque, bright bulbs outlining the shapes of the bold letters.) Anu Malik’s drop-dead gorgeous tunes are the soaring frameworks on which Kunder mounts his scenes, and when Suhaan (Salman Khan) recounts the events that led to his divorce from Piya (Preity Zinta), the room darkens, as if getting ready for a show. (You could add to this not insignificant list story-within-a-song items like Sachi yeh kahani hai from Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa or Aaj ki raat from Anamika.) But I don’t think anyone before Kunder has crafted such a gargantuan production entirely in this style. Amol Palekar and Vidhu Vinod Chopra have been there earlier – the former with his exquisite little Thodasa Roomani Ho Jaayen and the latter most recently with the Samjho ho hi gaya number in Lage Raho Munnabhai, where drunken tapori musings coexisted with eye-popping production pieces that mirrored these musings. Much is being made of the fact that Jaan-e-Mann has been fashioned along the lines of a Broadway musical, but this isn’t really anything new. Loo and ciggie breaks, in other words, these are not. (There’s an affectionate, black-and-white docu-homage to a Filmfare Awards ceremony from the 1970s.) His Jaan-e-Mann is a musical in the best sense of the word – not just because it has songs and dances, but because these songs and dances often take the place of dialogue and become inseparable from the narrative.
(The irony, of course, is that they already are in a movie!) That sly self-awareness (and self-referencing) of genre conventions is what made Farah Khan’s Main Hoon Na so much fun, and now we see that her husband, Kunder, appears equally in love with the Bollywood of old. In a way, he’s fashioned an entire script that seemingly takes off from an offhand conversation between the just-fallen-in-love Farooque Shaikh and Deepti Naval in Chashme Buddoor, where they laugh about the fact that if this were a movie, they’d suddenly be bursting into song, with rhyming lyrics and music and chorus dancers and all. The last thing you’d associate with our cinema is a nod to either Kubrick or cosmology – never mind that an intrepid lyricist once roped in the moon and the stars to acknowledge the incomparable beauty of, gulp, Zarina Wahab Chand jaise mukhde pe bindiya sitara… – but first-time director Shirish Kunder does reach for the moon and the stars, literally and otherwise. Strauss’ Blue Danube waltz plays on the soundtrack as the images on screen seem to be set in – wait for this! – the far reaches of outer space it’s all very 2001. – RIGHT FROM THE START, you know Jaan-e-Mann’s not going to be your regular Hindi movie. Yes, it overstays its welcome, but the ‘other’ Diwali release is the year’s most imaginative romance.
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