It has been 23 years since the release of ‘Zindagi Khubsoorat Hai’. The film, directed by Manoj Punj, did not follow the usual path, but it is still being discussed. While the film does not always hold the viewer’s interest, it stays true to its core themes.
The film explores the quality of life, with a screenplay following Amar (Gurdas Maan) on a journey of self-discovery. At the top level, ‘Zindagi…’ is a sanguinary drama of feudal warfare where an underworld don Gul Buloch (Ashish Vidyarthi) finishes off his sister’s husband and marriage assemblage on the wedding day, and then lives under the shadow of his traumatised sister’s contemptuous curse.
Amar’s efforts to heal the undeveloped, mentally challenged mind of a little girl Jameela (how we wish the characters weren’t made to describe her as “mentally retarded”) through his songs and music is yet another theme that runs through the film.
On another level, Suraj Sanim’s restless screenplay moves into a far more intimate human-interest story to tell the story of sensitive prostitute Shalu(Tabu) who dreams of reconstructing her life by repainting strokes of commonality in her exceptional life. The singer Amar’s efforts to rehabilitate the Fallen Woman and pull her out of a haze of debauchery and alcoholism echo novelist Saratchandra Chatterjee’s Devdas and three films, B.R. Chopra’s Sadhana, B.R. Ishaara’s Chetna and Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Satyakam.
The relationship between the singer and the prostitute forms the crux of this prismatic tale, where every character seems entrapped in a prison of ambitions and desires. The most lyrical passage of the film takes the unorthodox couple into the pristine valleys of Himachal Pradesh, where Shalu enacts her most cherished fantasy: that of being a simple housewife sharing basic elemental joys with her make believe husband Amar.
The theme of the damning dream confers a wonderful thought uninvolving weightiness on this film. Gurdas Maan and Tabu, specially the latter, play extraordinarily layered parts with ease and skill. Tabu plays the kind of Hindi film heroine we’ve never seen before. She‘s a dreamer who dares to chase her dreams, a woman of impulse surrendering to the moment with great charm. Some of Tabu quieter moments where she expresses the anguished pain of a woman who think she doesn’t deserve love, confirm the fact that Tabu is the best dramatic actress since her aunt Shabana Azmi. The moment when she tells Maan, “I’m a fallen woman and you’re first person to say so publicly” melts our hearts with glacial grace.
In this novel-on-film where the chapters unfold with creased consciousness, Gurdas Maan is the only binding force. His idealistic character runs through the plot persuasively. Maan’s appeal lies not in his histrionics but his ability to extend his stage personality into the performance. But how we crave to hear the singer sing in his own voice! Maan sings in the voices of Udit Narayan, Sonu Nigam, and finally himself.
That critical ambience of uniformity which finally makes the audience responsive towards a film of ideas such as this one, is conspicuous by its absence. Punj handles the characters sensitively. But the edgy strands and themes out-run the director’s best intentions. The conventional climax on a top of a hurling train, though gripping, seems to belong to a different world.
Model-turned-actor Sonu Sood’s bare-chested machismo is like a striptease in the midst of a delicate ballet. In one medieval display of virility, Sood plunges a sword into his belly button to prove his toughness to his mother. We almost expended the sword to come out from the other end. How we wish the plot’s simmering discontent, so much at odds with Tabu’s serene persona, would have been curbed to focus on a simple human interest story about a singer, a streetwalker and a mentally challenged girl.
Divya Dutta and Rajit Kapoor, in yet another sub-plot, typify Mumbai’s jetsetting couples whose morality in matters of human relationships are as variable as their immaculately manicured fingernails. Both the the sensitive actors struggle to assimilate themselves into the main event.
There’s no lack of vision in Punj’s direction. The trouble is, the multi-layered density of Suraj Sanim’s script doesn’t lend itself to Punj’s mass-oriented vision. While in his phenomenal Punjabi hit Shaheed-e-Mohabbat Buta Singh Punj moved singlemindedly to a rugged and straight rhythm, here he has to constantly stand still in his tracks as his characters lick their wounds and cleanse their souls.
The cinematography (Yogesh Jani-Ravi Bhat) and the choreography take this intimate film beyond the precincts of smallness. The film looks big even as the dialogues address themselves to questions of ethics and propriety in a milieu of monstrous materialism. High-minded and pitched at an idealistic plane, Zindagi Khubsoorat Hai needed to be edited more tightly. It projects an ongoing uncertainty that only reiterates what Gurdas Maan tells Tabu in a bar, “No matter how elaborate the screenplay a film has, it has to end somewhere.”
Suraj Sanim’s script takes off on a journey into the heart of mankind. But it just doesn’t know where it’s going. The protagonist Amar confesses that Devdas is his favourite film and he has seen it 17 times. Wonder how many times he’d see Zindagi Khubsoorat Hai.