U Me aur Hum (2008)

As the opening credits went by, crediting Ajay Devgan with the story, direction, production and lead role, it was hard not the be apprehensive, especially considering he’d roped his wife in as co-star. I love Kajol, but that doesn’t mean the movie is going to be good. And the first hour is pretty intolerable. Ajay (Ajay Devgan) meets Piya (Kajol) while on a cruise with his friends and goes to the typical ridiculous lengths to woo her. Ajay’s really too old for this exuberantly infatuated act, and the songs are bad. Finally that’s over and they get married, make a list of dreams for the future on their bedroom wall, and then things start to go wrong. Piya forgets things, sometimes little things, but when she gets lost on the street in front of her apartment building they have to admit something is going on and she’s diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimers at 28, and that her pregnancy is exacerbating her symptoms.

Yeah, the baby has been born and is right in their living room, being doted on by family and friends. Ouch.

This is pretty solid emotional melodrama, as long as you can accept Movie!Alzheimer’s for what it is: fits of confusion and forgetting with none of the messiness of the actual disease. Kajol pulls it off well, Ajay less so. In some of the shots it’s really obvious that he’s the director and thinks getting the view of his angst from every angle is very important. Ajay’s friends from the cruise are still around to help him through Piya’s decline-- they’re mostly forgettable, but Divya Dutta brings that extra solidity to her role which I always appreciate.

Finally, after an incident where she forgets her son in the bathtub, Ajay decides to admit Piya to a care facility, but she doesn’t stay. Ajay misses her too much, and Piya is scared and angry without him. And since this is Movie!Alzheimer’s, it’s totally okay to bring her back home and they live happily ever after-ish.

The nursing home looks bizarrely like an aquarium.

The central conceit of the movie is that this whole story is told in flashback, as older Ajay narrates the story to older Piya, while they are taking the 25th wedding anniversary cruise that they both dreamed of long ago, whether she remembers it or not. I guess living at home worked out because she doesn’t seem to have lost much function in the two decades since her diagnosis. If only true love could really manage degenerative brain disease like that.

My real problem with this movie isn’t with Movie!Alzheimer’s or that it’s a bad movie, it’s that instead of telling a story about an illness, it twists the illness to tell the story. And I’m all for filmi escapism, but diseases aren’t meaningful narratives. They're just shit that goes wrong. It's great if you can find meaning in that, but it gets on my nerves when you force it.