What can you say about 3 hours of musical melodrama? “Ick” might be the response of some of you. “Yippee!” might come from others. Me, I can say that I survived, but it was a close thing.
This was my first Bollywood experience, and I hadn’t realised that it was so melodramatic. One minute the characters were emoting their eyeballs out, the next they were singing and dancing with joint-cracking vigour. And while some of the singing was quite beautiful, and some of the dancing quite good, there were a number of occasions that looked like they’d been ripped straight from a 1930’s Busby Berkely musical, complete with aerial shots of whirling skirts and packs of dancers mugging at the camera. Some of the dancing, too, was badly choreographed, with the moves not matched to the tempo, and this meant the dancing lost the natural grace of the traditional dancing and looked just way too awkward.
I’d have to say that, while the film had some good moments, and a passel of extremely lovely people dressed in vibrantly lovely costumes, there were 2 or 3 too many dance numbers, and the emoting was too much for too long. If the film had been cut by half it would have worked a lot better. If it hadn’t been quite so overtly tender towards the idle rich it would have been better still: I can’t help wishing that I were a beautiful young princess with two handsome men in love with me, with nothing more to do with my time than dance and agonise about my love life. Alas, I’m neither beautiful nor a princess, and I have to work in the morning, so thus ends the review.