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Director
: Anurag Bose
Music : Nadeem Shravan
Lyrics : Sameer
Starring : Dia Mirza, Emran
Hashmi, Anupam Kher, Surekha Sikri |
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Nahin Dekha Movie Review : |
 "Tumsa
Nahin Dekha" is a faithful and shrewd adaptation
of Steve Gordon's 1981 smash hit "Arthur",
where Dudley Moore rose to dizzying, doddering fame
as a drunken millionaire.
Will this remake of
the romantic comedy about the pickled prince and the
spunky showgirl do a Moore for Emran Hashmi?
Not quite. Hashmi has
great all-round support for his "Arthur"-backed
part. But he looks wrong for it. The earthy bratty personality
that rendered itself well in the role of the manic lover
in "Murder" makes the young millionaire in
"Tumsa Nahin Dekha" more a gipsy than a tipsy.
Hashmi throws in a lot
of cuteness in his little-boy-lost, richie-rich, especially
in his scenes with his butler-foster father Anupam Kher.
And at the end, when all's well in the lovebirds' paradise,
Hashmi is very amusing as he tells Dia Mirza how he'd
love to be a poor desk-job worker.
But at the end of the
take, Hashmi renders a role that can't go any further
than Dudley Moore. Meant to look blissfully sozzled,
Hashmi quite often looks like the brat next door caught
with his hand in the cookie jar.
Kher does a fine job
of recreating Sir John Gielgud's role of the butler-cum-mentor
(done brilliantly earlier by the late Om Prakash in
"Sharaabi").
The pathos of the desolate
tycoon Daksh, watching his butler, friend, philosopher
and accompanist die of cancer (a bit of savage realism
here, since director Anurag Bose too suffers from the
same disease) is rendered at a scale that provides muted
and mellow drama to material that makes no bones about
its antecedents and yet dares to venture beyond what
was done in the original.
The romantic sequences have a certain reverberating
ring to them. And Mirza, so far relegated to utterly
inconspicuous parts, is a revelation.
As the bar dancer who
looks after her mentally challenged brother (some self-consciously
sensitive scenes between the siblings) and safeguards
her dignity ("I'm a dancer, not a prostitute,"
she screams at the tipsy tycoon), Mirza not only looks
lovely but brings a certain sensitivity to her part.
At times, for instance
at Daksh's engagement party, she looks as fragile and
yet as strong as Audrey Hepburn.
In the role of an independent-minded,
spirited and dignified working woman (still quite a
rarity in mainstream Hindi cinema!) Mirza certainly
makes a distinctive impact, quite different from how
Liza Minelli interpreted the working-class girl's role
in the original film.
The rest of the cast
and crew just follow "Arthur's" lead.
What shines through
this endearing adaptation is the director's romanticism.
Bose fills the film with long passages of courtship.
The sequence where Daksh
carries Mirza across a wooden bridge and catches a firefly
for her seems like a homage to the romanticism of the
golden era of Hindi cinema represented by Raj Kapoor
and Sanjay Leela Bhansali.
Sure, the whole affair that begins and ends with a stunning
smooch (the millionaire plants a wet smack right on
the show-girl's lips at a bus stand and she pays back
the compliment at the end) ends up looking rather unproductive
in the final reckoning.
But there are innumerable
moments in the film when we end up smiling at the plodding
and predictable progression of the romance.
The rather parodic portrayal
of aristocracy, symbolised by Surekha Sirkri's broad
and ribald portrait of Daksh's grandmother, brings a
quality of indulgence to the narrative. If you can't
beat the super-rich, you might as well ridicule them.
Bose often catches his
economically challenged (and therefore noble) heroine
pottering around at home against the backdrop of fluttering
mustard curtains. This recurrent butterfly-in-flight
image serves well to underline the mood that "Tumsa
Nahin Dekha" purports to capture.
Airy, cheerful, sunny
and breezy - "Tumsa Nahin Dekha" doesn't aim
to be a romantic classic. It just wants to bring a very
popular Hollywood romantic comedy of the 1980s to contemporary
Bollywood in a sensible and engaging way.
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