Kabhi Kabhie - Movie Review
Published: February 6, 2011
Starring Amitabh Bachchan, Raakhee Gulzar, Shashi Kapoor, Rishi Kapoor, Neetu Singh, Waheeda Rehman
Say what you will about filmmaker Yash Chopra—Bollywood's evergreen romantic—but over the course of his long career as a director and producer, he hasn't flinched from exploring difficult matters of the heart—and few relationship issues are more challenging than emotional infidelity, the subject of his Kabhi Kabhie.
There are nine characters, spanning two generations and including four couples and three interconnected love triangles—you need a playbill to keep it straight—all of which reflects a complicated topic that has insidiously far-reaching effects. But Chopra lingers long on the principals and stretches out their pile-up of pain and selfishness so the story doesn't feel muddled, and the measured pace never feels slow.
The title means sometimes—as opposed to always, which is what love is supposed to be, but the characters aren't fully committed in their relationships because they love people from their pasts and they keep secrets in the present that prevent true intimacy with their current partners.
Amit (Amitabh Bachchan) is a poet who falls in love with his college classmate, Pooja (Raakhee Gulzar). Pooja's parents arrange her marriage to Vijay (Shashi Kapoor) and neither Pooja nor Amit has the courage to defy her family, so they part ways, heartbroken. Pooja's new husband is a jovial man who's crazy about her, and she quickly becomes fond of him. Vijay happens to love Amit's poetry and doesn't know about his new wife's connection to the poet. He wonders aloud about the woman who inspired such beautiful verse and he asks Pooja to sing Amit's poetry to him on their wedding night. For the rest of his life, he remembers that night as wonderfully romantic when actually she was thinking about her former lover the whole time. They have a son, Vicky (Rishi Kapoor), a bon vivant just like his father.
Amit is less fortunate than Pooja. His heartache bankrupts him emotionally. He stops writing poetry and joins his father's construction company. He marries Anjali (Waheeda Rehman) and they have a daughter, Sweety, whom he adores—at the expense of loving his wife—and as a result, the spoiled Sweety is a complete brat.
Vicky, now a young man, falls in love with Pinky (Neetu Singh), the daughter of his father's doctor, R.P. Kapoor, and the couple gets engaged. Dr. Kapoor and his wife Shobha reveal to Pinky that she is adopted and she runs off to find her birth mother. Vicky follows Pinky, against her wishes, and he cruelly flirts with Pinky’s half-sister, who is smitten with him.
None of the characters cheat sexually, but their emotional betrayal and deception are even more damaging, and these all-too-realistically flawed characters are, to varying degrees, unable to see the harm they've caused even though they themselves have been hurt.
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