Mere Khwabon Mein Jo Aaye: Nightmare review
Madhureeta Anand has been a documentary filmmaker of long experience, and has made a number of films for channels like BBC and National Geographic. So, when she picks up a subject that talks of the importance of finding one's own voice, for her debut as a feature director, it sure is bound to raise expectations. But what a let down Mere Khwabon Mein Jo Aaye is! A story with lots of potential, this will remain an example of how weak scripting and weaker execution can kill a film.
The film had an interesting premise and an interesting device of taking forward the story with an element of fantasy. But when a film starts with a literal visual translation of the allegorical ‘˜need to find one's voice against all odds', it's a warning of a potential disaster. Yes, when fantasy is used as a story-telling device, many things need not be explainable logically, but then, it is a device that needs extremely intelligent handling. But when that fantasy comes in the shape of a wooden Randeep Hooda with a permanent, bemused smirk on his face, the courageous viewer is in danger.
To give the devil its due, Hooda appears in 18 - well, nobody counted, but that's what media reports had said in the run up to the release of the film - different avatars as Jay, a character who lives in the fantasies of Maya, the protagonist, played by Raima Sen who tries hard to bring sense to the state of affairs on the big screen. He plays Amitabh Bachchan, James Bond, Zorro, some king from the past, a flute-playing Krishna, a faux fur-wielding bare-torsoed casanove, and so on...in fact, whatever character Maya can refer to in her journey to find her own voice - literally as the music-loving girl who had to stow away her harmonium after marriage to Vikram (Arbaaz Khan), a two-timing scoundrel of an MCP husband who had visited to her home in small-town Meerut in a hideous wig (to look young probably!) and married her away to Delhi, where he works as a senior call centre guy.
Maya has been suffering all his taunts for the sake of her daughter and family honour, but when she accidentally comes to know about Vikram's clandestine affair with a carrot-chomping woman, she changes, slowly but surely. She now wants to find her own voice, and so brings out her old harmonium, and starts jamming with a struggling band whose members are her neighbours, going on to winning some kind of big talent hunt, and thus finding her own voice after a lot of trials and tribulations.
It could have been an interesting film, but weak characterisations - those played by the likes of Suhasini Mulay, Ashwani Kalsekar, Aanjjan Srivastav (well, Mr Wagle too has fallen victim to adding alphabets and consonants to names for better luck!) never go beyond their unidimensional and sketchy forms - make it a journey to nowhere. There are glaring weak links in the screenplay, especially towards the climax, most glaring of them being the sudden disappearance of the little daughter of the protagonist from the scheme of things. Has the mother, who is symbolic of all women who need to find their own identities in a male-dominated society, abandon her daughter at the neighbours whom she had been left with when Maya goes for her first big concert after winning the talent hunt? A sensitive mother throughout the film, who keeps on holding on to the marriage for the sake of her daughter, she suddenly forgets to even pick up her daughter from the neighbours at night and even the next morning when she wakes up to suddenly see that the object of her fantasy has become a reality? That too when the father has already abandoned both of them? If this had been a mindless entertainer where characters vanish as suddenly as they appear, one would not have raised these questions, but the film is supposed to be a quest into the theme in a much more serious mode. A film that has music as the escape route for the protagonist, it also suffers from very pedestrian music (courtesy Lalit Pandit of erstwhile Jatin-Lalit duo, which has given many a melodious tune in the past).
Khwab? Well, for viewers, this one is a tedious nightmare. Madhureeta Anand, with her documentary filmmaker's experience of realistic treatment to subjects, trips in fantasy land for sure.
