Subhash K. Jha speaks about Wafaa 
By Subhash K. Jha, December 20, 2008 - 12:48 IST
By the time Rajesh Khanna got into bed with one Ms Khan (who should've known better) for some good old 'Missionary' Impossible, I was no longer seeing what was going on. Images from all the old Rajesh Khanna films I grew up watching, were crowding and colliding in my mind. Surely this old henna-haired debauched man with wheezing libido and a jaded face could not be the ultimate superstar who serenaded legendary beauties like Sharmila Tagore, Mumtaz, Zeenat Aman, Raakhee and Asha Parekh with songs that R.D. Burman composed and Kishore Kumar sang to infinite immortality.
Nope, this was an imposter...This fumbling out-of-sync man on the screen who could do with regular visits to the gym rather than this romp in the bed with a starlet who looks like she could do with some self-control and a diet of fruit juices instead of body fluids. Many years ago, Rajesh Khanna had done a generation-challenged love story called Anokha Rishta. A real-life scandal had occurred on the sets when the starlet playing the superstar's Lolita accused her co-star of unbecoming behaviour. Not much was heard of the poor Sabia thereafter, except when she re-surfaced some years later as Akshay Kumar's co-star in Abbas-Mustan's Khiladi. Back then Akshay wasn't the Khanna's son-in-law. And back then Wafaa would've shamed less people around the once-was-superstar than today.
It's not the content of Wafaa that shocks so much as the lurid and lascivious treatment of the theme that leaves no room to doubt the film's maker's intentions. Films about ambitious women, gold- diggers who marry for money have come and groaned with all the heavy burden of having to carry the leading man's gravitas on its sexy shoulders. Bindu tried to do Dilip Kumar out of his millions in B.R. Chopra's Dastaan. Bobby Deol was quietly cuckolded by Ameesha in Abbas-Mustan's Humraaz.
But these were predominantly suspense thrillers meant to contour the dark evil side of femininity while creating a point of vanity for the 50-plus lover-man who at an age of retirement toils tirelessly in bed. Wafaa finds Rajesh Khanna's performance shockingly labored, both in and out of bed. It would have been mildly diverting even amusing if the banished superstar's hijinks were not so clumsily designed and executed. It isn't his fault, really. It's the presentation and packaging. They clearly indicate an embarrassing absence of positive intentions. Tragically, the plot in Wafaa kills not the tycoon in the film. But the career of the actor who plays the cuckolded tycoon. As for Amitabh Bachchan in Nishabd...let's not even go there. He did Lolita without embarrassing Nabokov or himself. The red-haired lecher lusting for Lolita in Wafaa is more like Shakti Kapoor from the South Indian remakes in the 1980s than any smooth-and-sensitive lover-boy Rajesh Khanna played in earlier decade.
Yes, this has got to be an imposter. Rajesh Khanna once lived in our cinema. RIP.
|
Rajesh Khanna and Zeenat Aman come together
