Subhash K. Jha speaks about Mere Khwabon Mein Jo Aaye 
By Subhash K. Jha, February 7, 2009 - 14:04 IST
First things first. I would like to give credit to this unintended comedy film, only for Randeep Hooda's effort, ranging from the brave to the ludicrous, to play different avatars of a bored housewife's secret fantasies.
It was Shabana Azmi who first voiced it. While working on a film on female infidelity, Ek Pal with a woman director Kalpana Lajmi, Shabana shocked me by saying every middleclass wife fantasizes about a secret lover.
Perhaps Madhurita Anand heard Shabana. The debutante director whips up what could have been a mildly diverting confectionary about a dissatisfied wife who chooses a rather cute way out of boredom in marriage. Unlike Satyajit Ray 's Charulata and all her dizzying spin-offs right down to the bed-time-stories of Mallika Sherawat in Murder, the wife in Mere Khwabon Mein Jo Aaye invents a phantom-lover, a somewhat cool urbane cynical wry and shamelessly multi-personality disordered Randeep Hooda who exists only in Maya's imagination.
Maya, get it?
Adultery in this way goes from the bed straight into the head. We've had actors doing a number of roles. Sanjeev Kumar played 9 characters in Naya Din Nayi Raat and Kamal Haasan played 10 in Dasavatharam. Randeep Hooda ups the ante. He slips into 18 roles (after the first few, you stop counting) with not quite the smooth suave transitions that one would expect to emerge from a multi-role bravura performance. Nonetheless, some of his avatars reveal a delicious sense of irony.
The film unfortunately reveals nothing but an acute scarcity of any sense of direction. In that ebullient Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd, Raima Sen played a bored wife who one fine day, hitches her sari and goes hang gliding.
This one fails to take off. And for no fault of Raima.
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"MKMJA shows that Marriages are not made in Heaven" - Arbaaz Khan
