Tomorrow will be Shahrukh

I love this movie, but I try to watch it when no one else is home, just so I don’t have to explain it. It’s ridiculous. Quintessential Karan Johar fluff. I don’t care. Sometimes that’s just what you want, and Kal Ho Naa Ho (tomorrow may not be) has all of the feelings, every single one of them, and sometimes all at once.

WOW SUCH VALUES

Naina (Preity Zinta) is an unhappy young women, living with her dysfunctional family in New York. Her grandmother blames Naina’s mother for her husband’s suicide, and constantly berates her granddaughter Gia because she was adopted. Naina’s mother Jennifer (Jaya Bachchan) is overworked, worried about money and keeps up an endless stream of bickering with her mother-in-law.

Then Aman (Shahrukh Khan) moves in next door to brighten their lives and embarks on a mission to cheer Naina up in the most annoying way possible.

So naturally she falls in love.

But Aman has A Secret which prevents him from returning her love, so he cooks up a plan to make Naina fall for her best friend Rohit (Saif Ali Khan). This plan also makes Rohit’s housekeeper think that he and Aman are sleeping together.

Although Naina enjoys getting closer to Rohit, the melodrama forces her to move on from Aman in an unnecessarily accelerated fashion.

This is terrible logic!

Even worse logic!

But two days before the wedding, after a medical episode caused by too much dandiya, Naina and Rohit find out the truth. Aman isn’t really married. His heart is failing, and he has only months to live. He loves Naina, but wants her to marry a man who could be there for her in the years he would be gone. Naina’s reaction to this is “how romantic!” instead of “how paternalistic!” and overcome by emotion, sobs inconsolably through her wedding to Rohit. 

There seems to be a lot of this over-the-shoulder framing in the movie.

He’s very sweet about it, but concerned about all the crying. They probably should have just postponed the wedding so the bride wouldn't be making everyone uncomfortable. Either way Rohit and Naina grow old together and think fondly of Aman.

It’s hard to make a movie about a dying man’s love without it being really emotionally manipulative. This movie doesn’t even try. It embraces it.

I mean, the entire wedding scene is just one whole tragic goodbye between Aman, Naina, and their doomed love story.

Yes of course it makes me cry anyway.

I call a lot of movies melodramatic, because honestly that’s what I like in my media. I want to watch great love, and great sacrifice, experience emotion on a grand scale, and have it all carefully contained within a three hour window. If I wanted to watch boring, dysfunctional people do boring dysfunctional things, I would just go outside once in a while. KHNH is a very satisfying way to get my melodrama fix.

Preity is charming, 

Saif is hilarious, 

and Shahrukh Khan Shahrukhs all over the place.

Sometimes that’s all you need.