Karan Johar’s Dhadak, which turns 7 on July 20, got caught in a strange situation vis-à-vis Majid Majidi’s A Walk In The Clouds. Ishaan Khatter’s debut film was going to be Karan Johar’s production Dhadak with Janhvi Kapoor also making her debut alongside Khatter. The dates, schedules, everything had been worked out.
Khatter was ready to shoot for Dhadak when he was offered A Walk In The Clouds.
Apparently, Majid Majidi was very keen on Khatter. Casting director Honey Trehan convinced the Iranian director that Khatter was right for the part. Majid Majidi saw the young debutant’s auditions and told Trehan Khatter was on.
That’s when Khatter was placed in a dilemma. If Karan Johar had not agreed to push his film forward, Khatter would have had to opt out of Majid Majidi’s film. Karan actually postponed Dhadak to accommodate Majid Majidi’s film!
Dhadak turned was remake of Nagraj Manjule’s Marathi masterpiece Sairat. A film about honour killing, Dhadak is aptly an honourable failure, giving us some of what is desirable, but largely leaving much to be desired. Like all great love stories, Dhadak ends as a tragedy. Which is not to say that it is a great love story. Replicating, almost echoing all the conventions of a love-at-first-sight-doom-at-a-later-stage yarn, Dhadak makes all the right noises (includes a super-melodious title song) and is still unable to create a concordant musical symphony.
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A film about honour killing, it is aptly an honourable failure, giving us some of what is desirable, but largely leaving much to be desired. Big-time passion erupts between the rich politician Ashutosh Rana’s haughty daughter Parthavi (Janhavi Kapoor) and the affable boy next door Madhukar (Ishaan Khatter). Ishaan, God bless his effervescent spirit, is all over the place wooing and wowing the girl with all the tricks up his sleeve. He is like a peacock in Udaipur trying to impress his partner during the mating season.
And very effective at that. Ishaan carries the film which is stricken by underwhelming performances. The heroine’s docile mother in Sairat left a mark in spite of her limited dialogues. Her counterpart in this film is stuck with her artificial anxieties and fake makeup.
Janhavi Kapoor has a quiet charm about her. But she has a long way to go. She is effective in the scenes after the elopement when she has to cope with “poverty” and “hardships.” That is, Karan Johar’s concept of poverty, which means the couple has to slum it out in Kolkata with a kindly Bengali couple serving as their guardian originals.
This brings me to the cinematography. Vishnu Rao shoots Udaipur and Kolkata like entries on a tourist brochure. A mediocre film like Lion captured the brutal dispassion of The City Of Joy.
In Sairat it was a benevolent Auntyji from the slums who gave the on-the-run couple a room and respite. The rawness and immediacy of the original is completely lost in the remake, as the protagonists seem to subscribe to the plot ideas from Sairat without being able to fit them into the environment provided in the remake.
The finale, which shocked everyone in Sairat, here seems force-fed to serve up a brutal lesson on honour killing. If I say nothing in the film prepares us for the gruesome ending, I don’t mean it as a compliment. If Dhadak is still watchable in parts, it’s because Ishaan Khatter is constantly injecting his exuberant conviction into every scene. He doesn’t question why things are what they are. He trapezes across the tides of designer wear-and-tear, hoping the doomed love story would finally make sense.
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