Part 1 here. Obviously, I loved the movie. With Govinda and Rani being their fabulous selves, it’s pretty easy to enjoy it on a superficial level. I didn’t even feel the need to snark (much). Sure, you have to suspend your disbelief that Sunder is able to pull off the charade and nobody figures out that he can actually speak for most of the movie, and you just have to revel in the sheer filminess, but the whole package just worked for me.
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| Sunder's speech about his mother's tears in the clay toys she sold. You can almost see his mother in black and white, with tears on her face and mud on her sari. |
And some really good lines, like these: “When I first made a painting of my crying mother, the world didn’t go and wipe those off. The world did congratulate her.”
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| I love the contrast between his silence when he's with Payal and these eloquent monologues. |
It helps that Sunder is a genuinely nice person. There’s no dude-bro exterior around the gooey sentimental inside and he doesn’t start wooing Payal like a crazy stalker. So he’s nice, and likeable, and it’s easy to see why Payal falls in love with him, but he’s not perfect. He doesn’t make the right decisions, and as the movie goes on, his anguish about lying to Payal turns into hating himself for his cowardice. And by the end, he’s gotten so absorbed in his self-hatred that he doesn’t even consider Payal’s feelings-- even overhearing that she wants to marry him doesn’t convince him to come clean, it just makes him decide on more crazy.
And Payal! She does things! I’m not going to claim that she’s some sort of groundbreaking Shruti Kakkar type character, but for a movie made 10 years ago, the script treats her initiative with a refreshing lack of concern. And after watching a lot of 90s movies, it’s so nice that she never has to be rescued.
It’s not perfect. There are the obligatory Really Annoying Friends and also Johnny Lever. And the plot is not exactly novel. But Rani and Govinda are fantastic, and this is my absolute favorite of their three movies together.
On to the ending!
We left off with Payal begging Sunder to tell her he loves her, and him avoiding her eyes and refusing to speak.
The tension builds, until the doctor from earlier in the movie appears, and mysteriously tells everyone that Sunder can’t actually speak, which is a surprise to everyone. We flash back to some point after Sunder finds out Payal wants to marry him. He’s in the doctor’s office, begging him to do surgery to make himself truly mute. The doctor, though, has heard of the hippocratic oath, and isn’t interested. Sunder pleads with him in another eloquent speech about the depth of his love, and the doctor appears to be persuaded.
Sunder seems to believe that he has to give up his voice in order to be worthy of Payal’s love, that making his lie the truth should be his penance. This is both pleasingly melodramatic and REALLY, REALLY unhealthy. Anyway, the doctor tries to make things right by planning to call Payal and sort out the dysfunctional web of lies that is their relationship, but Sunder finds out. He bursts into the doctor’s office, roots around in the basket of scalpels sitting on the desk and slices his tongue off. Yep. Right in front of some poor kid who was probably just there for speech therapy or something.
Now, that is quite an ending to a movie that had up until then been very solidly in the line of cheesy early-2000s romances. I can’t quite decide if it’s completely batshit, or if I kind of like that they went there. I mean, in all the other movies of this genre, you don’t see any long-term consequences of a deception that lasted the entire length of their relationship. I guess you don't see the consequences here, either, but I do like how it ends on this ambiguous note instead of magical happiness for everyone.
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