Kyun! Ho Gaya Na - Movie Review
Published: August 10, 2011
Starring Aishwarya Rai, Vivek Oberoi, Amitabh Bachchan
Love and marriage can be a chicken-or-egg kind of thing in India—which comes first matters a great deal to some people. For Diya (Aishwarya Rai), a serious college student, love must precede marriage. Happy-go-lucky Arjun (Vivek Oberoi) wants his parents to pick his bride—although he has no intention of letting love grow from the union. Kyun! Ho Gaya Na negotiates the conflict by arranging their love, so to speak, so they both unwittingly win.
Arjun is an interesting twist on the old commitment-phobic/emotionally unavailable character—it isn't the actual commitment such a person fears, but rather it’s the vulnerability that comes with love, and for Arjun, making a loveless marriage is a way to avoid the emotional intimacy he’s too immature to handle.
But Arjun's adoring parents want him to love the spouse they choose for him, and Diya's dad wants the same for her, so they concoct a plan for their children to fall for each other, with the intention of arranging their marriage later—but it doesn't exactly work out as hoped.
Diya travels to Mumbai to take a big exam and she stays with Arjun's family. While there, she and Arjun become flirtatious friends, and their developing love story is utterly charming—until the plot abruptly veers halfway through the film with the appearance of Diya's uncle, Raj Chauhan (Amitabh Bachchan), who commandeers the rest of their romance. Her uncle (played by an actor who would someday become Rai's father-in-law) runs an orphanage—Diya works there, Arjun follows—and far too many cute-kid antics ensue.
The casting of the leads is a little far-fetched, given that both actors are considerably older than the characters they play. Oberoi's boyish looks and convincing juvenile act make him a little more believable than Rai, who is three years older than Oberoi and who exudes a sophistication and maturity in both her appearance and demeanor that acting can't overcome.
But the biggest problem with the story is the passivity of the hero, whose development is orchestrated by others right up to the end. At some point, Arjun and Diya should have together resolved the conflict on their own.
The film marks the only on-screen pairing of Rai and Oberoi, who were a real-life couple at the time. Interestingly, after breaking up in 2005, they both went on to become happily settled the same way their characters sought to be—Rai made a love match with actor Abhishek Bachchan in 2007 and Oberoi's marriage was arranged to a prominent politician's daughter, Priyanka Alva, in 2010.
Kyun! Ho Gaya Na is rated Worth Watching.
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