Mausam Reviews !!!! - Page 11

The Sigher and the Trier
Film: Mausam
Director: Pankaj Kapur
Starring: Shahid Kapur, Sonam Kapoor, Supriya Pathak, Anupam Kher and Aditi Sharma
Rating: 

She sighs beautifully. He grits his teeth manfully. She arches her neck just so she can drape it over his arm when they dance. He holds his spine ramrod straight the minute he puts his aviators on. She skulks on stairways hoping he will recognize her. He wades through snow to rush back to her. She is a Kashmiri Muslim fleeing from militancy. He is a Punjabi scarred by Operation Bluestar. Together they traverse India's modern history, meeting and parting at key points.

She has to leave the tiny fictional village of Mallukot because of tension after the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992. He has to leave Scotland where he is training because the Kargil war breaks out in 1999. 9/11 features as do the Godhra riots. She weeps silently, he gnashes his teeth some more. But as the young starcrossed lovers span continents and circumstance, he an Indian Air Force pilot and she a sometime ballet dancer-sometime shopkeeper, the audience loses the plot.

Every scene is beautifully shot, the romance is meant to grow on you with its artful glances and coy exchanges. But instead of a slow burn, it's just plain exhaustion. In the age of instant email and easily transported cellphones, the lovers leave no forwarding addresses or contact numbers. They rely instead on the goodness of neighbours and the willingness of relatives. This is Pankaj Kapur's first film as director and clearly he's aiming for an old fashioned epic. He pours his heart and mind into it, tying it up in a neat little bow into a message for insaniyat in the time of brutality, but I wish his lovers had been more ardent. And more suited to each other. He's a peacock and she's a swan and the twain shall never mate.