Farah’s first film, Main Hoon Naa was a song-and-dance about Shah Rukh Khan and senselessness about a subject she, her writer, and her audiences knew nothing about (a bunch of Indian Army veterans out to take on the Indian Army itself, or some such gibberish).
Her second film, a more than so-so Om Shanti Om (OSO) is again a two-and-half hours long song-and-dance about Shah Rukh Khan (twice over), and yet more senselessness; but on the only subject that the director and her crew perhaps know most about: pictures, and people who work in the pictures; inside jokes and anecdotes on pictures and its people. It helps considerably that Farah has turned up with a screenplay this time.
The script then allows her the leg-room to go beyond a spoof, of what’s already an enduring spoof (Bollywood).
Shah Rukh first plays one Omprakash Makhija, a minor actor, or Bollywood junior-artiste of the ’70s. He aspires to become a movie-star. His commonplace surname is not the only deterrent to that dream. Makhija comes from a home of junior-artistes. He has a melodramatic mother (Kirron Kher), a close friend (Shreyas Talpade), and a ‘girlfriend’ he speaks to through a movie billboard. She is Shantipriya (Padukone), the top leading lady of her times.
Makhija saves the woman of his fantasy from a fire on a film-set. They become friends. She is secretly married, he realises later, to a famous producer and is even pregnant. Were she to come out with the news, the producer would lose lakhs spent on his pet-project (heroines, when married, lose their job and their fans at the same time). The producer (Arjun Rampal) sets his wife on fire now. Makhija cannot save her this time. He cannot save his life either. He is run down by a speeding car of a Bollywood superstar while trying to save his girl. The small-time extra is then reborn as the superstar’s son, Om Kapoor or OK, in a story 30 years later about reincarnation and revenge. Arrogant OK is born with a silver-spoon and celluloid fans: “Jab OK take deta hai, toh OK take deta hai!”
Yes, this is a family and friends film. Self-obsessions are fairly omnipresent. But there are enough bits and pieces in it to extricate it from merely a school function of the movie frat that it could have turned out to be. The odes to Subhash Ghai’s Karz, or Bimal Roy’s Madhumati, or Manmohan Desai’s Naseeb (or Desai in general) are obvious. SRK is milked dry to please his lot with a lively little joke on South Indian flicks here; a dance or dialogue impersonation of other actors there.
There’s still something to this wilfully exaggerated, silly cinema that seems the director has either heard or lived through: the manner of shooting a moving car in the films back in the day; daily shenanigans of a film-studio and its politics; the odd gags on Govinda or Sooraj Barjatya; pot-shots on what the director perceives of intelligent films or their critics…
Importantly, self-references do not entirely take away from a tight commercial pot-boiler that there is to narrate. The pot-boiler is still the point. On most occasions, it gets narrated to resolve well.
You may never be late for this film. The votes of thanks and sponsors on its opening credits is a short-film of its own. Such ‘event pictures’ that advertise to keep your worries away are as idiot-proof as they are critic-proof. Marginal returns on such a genre are minimal, if not nil now. But it’s far less self-serious and thereby far more amusing. Clearly, a better musical to catch this big-ticket weekend, though it’s not quite the greatest weekend ever.
Mumbai Mirror rating: 3/5