Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna - Movie Review

Published: November 12, 2009

By JENNIFER HOPFINGER

Starring Shahrukh Khan, Rani Mukerji, Abhishek Bachchan, Preity Zinta, Amitabh Bachchan, Kirron Kher

Director Karan Johar has built a wildly successful career making movies about Indians living in the West. Non-resident Indians, as they’re called, are a lucrative foreign box-office market (Indians are the wealthiest ethnic group in the U.S.) and films about them are a significant Bollywood subgenre. Johar has his finger on the pulse of the privileged and he’s expert at scrutinizing their emotional lives. For all their trendy clothes and cool jobs and swanky homes, they struggle—at least personally.

Johar’s films sometimes focus on the difficulties of maintaining an Indian identity in another culture, but in Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, the ethnicity of the Indian characters living in New York City is incidental, and so is their wealth. The story revolves around two unhappily married couples seeking the only thing they don’t already possess: love.

Dev (played by Shahrukh Khan) is a professional soccer player who becomes a stay-at-home dad to his nine-year-old son, Arjun, after a career-ending injury. Dev’s wife Rhea (Preity Zinta) is an ambitious, hard-working editor at a fashion magazine. Bitter about his injury and resentful of his wife’s success, Dev feels emasculated—and he takes out his frustration on his sensitive son who would rather be a violinist than an athlete. Maya (Rani Mukerji) is a regimented schoolteacher who’s married to—and thoroughly annoyed by—Rishi (Abhishek Bachchan), a fun-loving events planner. Dev and Maya both settled for comfortable, passionless marriages—based on friendship but no shared interests—shortchanging their spouses who want more. Whatever contentment they may have started with has given way to constant bickering. On the surface, Rhea and Rishi seem like ideal spouses—attractive, successful, and in love with their partners—but behind closed doors, Rhea is neglectful and condescending and Rishi is childish and passive aggressive. Dev and Maya, on the other hand, are overtly difficult people: he’s a prickly misanthrope; she’s a clean freak and a homebody. All four actors make these characters immensely engaging, despite their disagreeable traits.

Dev and Maya become friends thinking they can give each other the moral support they need to save their marriages, but they come alive only when they’re together, and they understand and accept each other’s quirks in a way their spouses don’t. Their deepening involvement plays out against a stunning backdrop of New York landmarks, including the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Station, Central Park, Washington Square, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Columbia University.

Rishi’s father, Sam (Amitabh Bachchan), a lothario who beds women young enough to be his granddaughters, develops a warm connection with a woman his own age when he befriends Dev’s mother, Kamaljit (Kirron Kher), and the two conspire to help their kids’ marriages.

Despite its over-the-top moments (the minor non-Indian characters are excessively buffoonish for comic effect), the film treats the tough topic of adultery with frankness and resonates with feeling.

Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna is rated Must See.

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