U Me Aur Hum - Movie Review
Published: February 21, 2010
Starring Ajay Devgan, Kajol
Actor Ajay Devgan makes his directorial debut and stars opposite his real-life wife, Kajol, in this, their 7th film together. While the melodramatic story line borrowed from the Hollywood film The Notebook (2004) is certainly conducive to Bollywood treatment, the film fails to entertain.
Ajay (Devgan) and Piya (Kajol) are an older married couple. She has Alzheimer’s disease and can’t remember her husband, so he approaches her as a stranger and tells her their love story, which unfolds in flashback, without her realizing that it’s about the two of them. In The Notebook, different actors play the characters at different ages, but here, the leads play the characters throughout, so there’s no mystery about what’s going on—you know right from the start that Piya can’t remember her past. Their story, which isn’t romantic in the least, begins on a cruise ship, when they’re both young and carefree—she’s a cocktail waitress and he’s a passenger traveling with two couples—Vicky and Natasha, who are happily married, and Reena and Nikhil, who are unhappily married (none of them serve any purpose in the story). The audience is told that Ajay is a cool and charming guy, but he doesn’t seem very impressive at all. The first time Piya meets him he gets wasted and makes a fool out of himself. Then, he sneaks into her room and reads her diary in order to use the personal information to woo her. He lies about liking all the same things she does—chocolates, Paris, salsa dancing, Labradors—and wins her heart. She finds out he’s lying, forgives him, and marries him. Gee, what a catch. Not long after, she’s diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s.
I have family members with this disease and I was affected by the film’s depiction of it. While it’s far from completely accurate, it’s much more realistic than The Notebook. Alzheimer’s patients are often terror-stricken, or at the very least, extremely anxious about their confusion, and the film does a fine job of capturing that relentless panic as well as the frustration and helplessness of loved ones. It also shows the teasing, bittersweet moments of lucidity that a person with dementia can have, when they fleetingly become their old selves and just as quickly disappear again.
But the film’s representation of these aspects of the disease is part of the problem with it. The second half, in which Piya rapidly deteriorates, goes on and on and on with no reprieve—much like Alzheimer’s—leaving the audience as frazzled as the characters.
U Me Aur Hum is rated Skip.
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