Subhash K Jha speaks about Jannat 
By Subhash K. Jha, May 17, 2008 - 12:07 IST
More more more…The motto of motorized materialism seems to have overtaken contemporary life. Everyone wants the good things of life in the shortest time possible.
The acquisitive spirit has seldom been defined with such economy of storytelling.
Not surprisingly, a lot of Jannat, Mahesh Bhatt's latest exposition on the excesses of materialism, is shot in shopping malls, expensive restaurants, and posh stadiums where money flows like unadulterated honey. And when our hero of the 'modem' times sees the love of his life staring at a diamond ring he walks into the showroom and breaks the show -window glass.
Get what you want by force…and forget those homilies that Papa preached at the dinner table about the virtues of honesty. "Honest money means hard work and little reward," says a wry character. He's obviously not read Ayn Rand. Sanjay Masoom's scathing dialogues scamper across the film's lush skyline to create a language of constantly covetous wana-breeds who would stop at nothing to get that new villa on the Gold Coast.
Let's then applaud one more moral fable from Mahesh Bhatt's sensible stable. Jannat tells us to waste not, want 'nought'…By all means covet the zeroes on that paycheck. But don't forget if you run after the zeroes your life ends up in the zero zone.
40 years ago in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Satyakam Dharmendra had refused to succumb to all the temptations of materialism that were strewn in his path to salvation. Lying dying of cancer, he's asked by his wife, 'Finally what do you have to say about your life of integrity?' 'I've lived,' said Dharmendra at the end of Satyakam. Can Emraan Hashmi (playing the small-time wheeler-dealer who turns into a cricket better then a match-fixer, criminal and moral transgressor) turn around before his gruesome death to say he has lived? Yes, Arjun, (Hashmi) has loved. At heart Jannat is a dark tragic love story. While the girl's innocence and the man's corruptible countenance resembles Kalyug, the whole dilemma of the beloved being instrumental in destroying the criminal hero echoes Gangster.
Both Kalyug and Gangster were superior in content and treatment. Debutant director Kunal Deshmukh cannot escape the clichés on existentialism that have come to surround Mahesh Bhatt's cinema. The morally conflicted Shakespeare-meets-James Hadley Chase hero, the independent-minded strong and value-based heroine(who usually lives in the city alone and sleeps before marriage with the hero), the hero's trusted and loyal friend (Purab Kohli in WohLamhe, Shaad Randhawa in Awaarapan, and now Vishal Malhotra in Jannat). The ideologue father whose principles are held up for ridicule until the hero discovers the hard way that dad's remedies are still the best way to deal with ethical ambivalence…
These lingering leitmotifs get a renewed if not luminous life in every Mahesh Bhatt production. Jannat lacks the resonance and staying power of some of Bhatt's earlier films about crime and punishment from Naam to Gangster. Cleverly and cautiously, Kunal Deshmukh's film brings in the cricket element which has audiences ignoring the pitfalls of rejuvenating Mahesh Bhatt's age-old iconoclasm. The stock footage of real-life cricket matches are used well and sparingly in the plot. The stress, as ever in Bhatts saga of our stressful times, is on the clashing colliding crisscross of human relationships. While Emraan's father's sequence in his son's luxurious bathroom where he comments on the basket of soaps is a whammer the wheeler-dealing in the greenroom and clubs with cricketers of indeterminate nationality behaving like debauched goblins, smack of amateurishness. The murder of the Australian coach turns the Bob Woolmer scandal into a climactic add-on. May his soul rest in peace.
But what stays is the protagonist's passion for money as opposed to his love for Zoya (Sonal Chauhan). The end game where the engagement ring is juxtaposed against the gun to suggest love's fugitive, is arresting in more ways than one. While Emraan Hashmi interprets the over-reaching get-rich-quick schemer's part with a native cunning, one misses that suave smooth transition in the character that perhaps a Naseeruddin Shah or even a Shahid Kapoor would bring on the table. But Hashmi is charming enough to let the protagonist's journey from Chawl to Cape Town look interesting. He's constantly getting author-backed roles of the angst-ridden social outcast (a garage-sale version of Bachchan) which he plays with a fair amount of sensitivity.
The debutant Sonal Chawla has much more to do than the decorative doll she seems equipped to be. She's the weakest link in the power play where the politics of the playing field is extended into an engrossing exposition greed and atonement. Some of the supporting cast specially Javed Sheikh as the cricketing don and Abhimanyu as his silent henchman come to grips with their characters better than you would expect in a film that has scant space for anyone except the man who would be king. And a world that is constantly f…ing the wannabe king.
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