A totally useless film. Don't waste your time. Also read this review below.
Salaam Namaste review:
My Dil Goes Mmmm” the trendy-looking leading pair hum while skipping down the road. Alas, there is very little here that makes my heart skip a beat, never mind go ‘mmmm’.
Siddharth Anand wants his “Salaam Namaste” to be a mature look at relationships but he also wants it to be a vacuous screwball comedy. You can sense a struggle between the two genres and Anand never lets the film get introspective, eventually letting it end up as an overdone romantic melodrama that is only too aware that the audience might be watching.
The signs of an overanxious new director (this is Anand´s debut) are obvious. He is so desperate to grasp the audience´s attention that he uses manipulative gimmicky plot tricks. Each time a character appears, the narrator (Abhishek Bachchan) takes us through their history and background. Even less important supporting characters are not spared this and they too go through the motions of tacky introduction sequences. Such god-awful narrative methods made me wonder if Anand had any regard for the audience´s intelligence or if he was making cinema for Dumbos. Why not just let the story itself explain the nuances of the characters?
The babyish treatment is inappropriate for a film that deals with a grown-up and sensitive topic. Despite the packaging, the topic is fresh and not something that we often see in this lane of Hindi cinema. Nick and Ambar (Saif Ali Khan and Preity Zinta) are two Indians who live in the Australian city of Melbourne. Nick is a chef and Ambar is a radio show presenter. Nick is a night owl and not one to trust for morning appointments since he falls asleep so late. He is too late for his morning interview on Ambar´s radio show and the girl is so peeved that she spends the next few days assassinating his character on the programme.
Finally, they meet for the first time and the mutual hate turns into mutual attraction and pyar vyar and gaana bajaana etc. Ambar is not convinced of Nick´s love for her so he suggests one thing - they live together to find out just how much they love each other. Everything is fine and hunky-dory until a new visitor arrives in their relationship. Ambar is pregnant and a baby is the last thing that Nick wants.
The characters are irritating, which doesn’t help the actors one bit. Saif Ali Khan spends the entire film whining and complaining. His character is an immature and unlikeable one. Khan’s comedy gives us the occasional break but the humour is often forced and at odds with the repressed delicate layers of the story. Preity Zinta is getting repetitive as an actress and seriously needs to take up more challenging and diverse roles. Her character is a regurgitation of Naina from "Kal Ho Naa Ho". The two stars overact in their bickering scenes and these sequences are very drawn-out. The script makes the fatal mistake of exaggerating the fights to keep the humour in the frame.
There are insightful moments that make up for the chaos elsewhere. When Nick feels the baby kick in Ambar’s tummy or when Ambar comes out of her maternity class and feels loneliness, the film finally begins to scratch below the surface and show a bit of depth. But the way the story is wound up is frustratingly contrived. Siddharth Anand uses a number of plot devices, which involve the one-night-stand-that-never-happened as well as Ambar´s-water-breaking-earlier-than-expected, to bring a thuddering halt to the maturity that the story was beginning to show.
This film suffers under the weight of a completely ineffective supporting cast. Javed Jaffrey tries to raise a laugh or two in the garb of a very weird character but this comic attempt is a misfire. Arshad Warsi´s comic timing is ruined by a horrible performance from Tania Zaetta, who plays his wife. The script pretends that Jugal Hansraj’s character is an important one but he is not needed. The rest of the supporting actors act as if they are in a cartoon, they make faces and shout... This must be what they consider to be comedy. Only Abhishek Bachchan survives with an ounce of dignity and is genuinely hilarious in his cameo at the climax.
To add the cream to the pudding, the dialogues are so banal that when Saif Ali Khan mutters “Oh crap!” for the umpteenth time, you wonder if he is shouting at the writers.
To put it in a nutshell, this is yet another flick that makes a hoo-haa about a touchy subject but doesn’t tap into the full potential of the topic. My response: Salaam, Namaste and Goodbye!
.
.
