Another Movie Review of Jazbaa Starring Irrfan Khan and Aishwarya Rai

DIRECTOR: Sanjay Gupta
STARRING: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Irrfan Khan, Shabana Azmi
RATING: 2 stars

In the end a friend asks Irrfan Khan (Yohaan) why he lets Aishwarya Rai (Anuradha) go when he loves her. He replies, “Pyar hain tabhi jaane diya, zidd hoti toh baahon mein hoti.” Wait, let me take that crown of misogyny from Kapil Sharma’s head and adorn it on your head Mr. Irrfan Khan. Because let’s face it, all that matters is that you love Anuradha, that you let her go, that you would FORCE her in your arms, if YOU were obsessed with her. And that makes you the hero of the film. Wow. That kind of regression was the only thing missing in Jazbaa; hurrah, it was fulfilled in the last scene.
Anuradha Verma is the best lawyer in all of Milky Way! And that’s not even an exaggeration dude. She gets a murderer, a rapist out on bail because she convinces the judge that there was another person present at the crime. No, the judge is not a school going kid.

She is forcefully hired by some voice on the phone who wants her to fight and win a case of a rapist or else he would kill her daughter. The rapist’s victim is Garima’s (Shabana Azmi’s) daughter. Wow, mamma against mamma, perfect recipe for full melodrama. And we are not let down. Painfully long lectures roll out at every given opportunity --- lectures on maa ki mamta, aaj ki naari, dard ki seema and my favourite main majboor thi.
Gosh, if I won a dirham for every cheesy dialogue, I would be a millionaire by the end of the film.

And then there is Irrfan Khan and his set of dialogues. There is never a straight reaction from him. Sample this-

Tum yaha rehte kaise ho?
Main yaha nahi rehta, yahan intezaar rehta hain! Errr…ok!!
Main nahi so sakti, mujhe kaam karna hain?
Neend ek mashooka hain…something something…aur raat humsafar hain…blah blah blah! Sorry, I asked that question.
On sharafat!
Jinke phone mein password nahi hota woh shareef hote hain! BURP!

But it’s not actors’ fault; it’s the writers who just wanted to flaunt their vocabularies, their imageries, their analogies. So what if it has got nothing to do with the film and its story, at least it’s poetic, oops, I mean painfully poetic.

Hence the emotions never reach us. I never felt Anuradha’s pain when her daughter was kidnapped. I never felt Garima’s pain when she was fighting to get her dead daughter justice. There was no pain, only words and overacting: mujhe meri beti ki cheekhe sunai de rahi hain…oh really, so sad…where is my popcorn!

Irrfan-easy-breezy-I-am-so-real-Khan plays the mumbling version of Rowdy Rathore’s Don’tAngryMe Akshay Kumar. You see Irrfan Khan doesn’t scream like Akshay. He is a real actor bhai, he only mumbles. His pointless dialoguebaazi evoked irritation in me that’s reserved strictly for karele ki sabzi.

Aishwarya-15-expressions-for-one-emotion-Rai exhausts every muscle in her body to ACT, like making up for no work in the past five years, like let me do all the acting in this film, not sure when the next project comes along. She plays a lawyer. Give us some tension-filled court scenes, some reason, some logic, some investigation. Alas, we have gyan.

The film gives such gyan on life, love and universe that it seems less like a whodunnit murder mystery and more like a satsang. There is a spiritual spin to everything. A character in the movie says, I like holding my coffee mug close, because I want to hold my life close and feel it with my naked fingers. I laughed out so loud that my cheeks still hurt.

Yep, you can hold the coffee mug close, hold your life close too. I am not sure if you should come anywhere close to Jazbaa.

WHAT THE RATINGS MEAN:
5 stars: Loved it. (This could make to top ten movies you must watch before you die!)
4 stars: Liked it. Recommend it. (This will help you sound intellectual and give you stuff to add at water cooler conversations.)
3 stars: Didn’t hurt. Watch it once.
2 stars: It put me to sleep. Watch it if you are an insomniac or a newly wedded couple. Winks!
1 star: Do I even need to explain this?