Barkhaa
Genre : Romance
Director : Shadaab Mirza
Cast : Sara Loren, Tahaa Shah, Priyanshu Chatterjee, Puneet Issar
In Hindi cinema there was a time where the hero from a noble background used to lose his way in the red light areas and mostly ended up discovering true love in the mean streets. The director used to humanise people living in these areas and with good music we came out of these melodramas searching for an ideal world.
Director Shadaab Mirza reinvents the premise in the dance bars, giving us an insight as how these bars were maligned by politicians with vested interests. Mirza seems to be confident that he is making an epic romance but actually he is picking nuts and bolts from classics to create a unit of clichés with lots of wood work.
Leading the way is Sara Loren, who plays the girl from Himachal who makes the ends meet by dancing in a dance bar. She has been duped in love and as expected, hates men. In comes Jatin (Tahaa), the son of a legal eagle (Punit Issar), who falls in love with her without knowing her address. When he discovers her past, he wants to take her out of the mess. But will he be able to face the society?
Mirza has laced the dialogues with abusive words to give a realistic touch to his make believe world and here, surprisingly, the CBFC has neither used its scissors nor pressed the mute button.
While for Sara silence proves to be golden, Tahaa Shah, in trying to copy Shah Rukh Khan, ends up as a caricature. As for the film it remains a wannabe. A couple of songs manage to create more emotional upheaval than the cast manage to conjure up in two hours. By the end a tearjerker acquires a whole new meaning!
Bottomline: Overwrought and laboured, the idea to reignite a good old flame fails lacks both passion and pain.
