'Mausam': out of step with the seasons - Movie Review
October 9, 2011
Starring Shahid Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor
Romantic epics—with beautiful lovers separated by fate, their passion spanning years and geography—are rapidly becoming a thing of the past (although more so in Western film than in Indian) because that kind of story could likely only happen in the past. These days, most love stories set in the present focus on internal conflict since social obstacles and political strife have receded as challenges to love in modern times. But not entirely—the world has certainly been troubled of late—and Mausam tells the tale of a Punjabi boy and a Kashmiri girl pulled apart by religious conflict in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Mausam aims to be a refreshing throwback to the exalted love found in romantic classics, but with a contemporary setting, and it has all the elements of a great film—except the most important element, a great story—and on that count, it fails spectacularly.
In its favor, the film boasts an engaging score and dance numbers that pop. The cinematography by award-winning Binod Pradhan, whose work includes the visually-stunning Devdas (2002) and the Sonam Kapoor-starrer Delhi-6 (2009), is outstanding.
Mausam is the directorial debut of accomplished actor Pankaj Kapur, who cast his son, Bollywood heartthrob Shahid Kapoor, in the lead. Shahid proved long ago that he's more than a pretty boy (although his physical attributes are fully on display here) and he carries the film with his considerable talent and charisma as his character, Harry, evolves from a playful youth infatuated with a girl he barely knows to a mature military pilot who courts her in an adult and dizzyingly romantic fashion, becomes a war hero, and suffers a debilitating injury he struggles to overcome.
The character of Aayat, played by Sonam Kapoor, is much less developed—her role is simply that of tragic, lovelorn object of Harry's adoration. Aayat is the Forrest Gump of religious clashes—unrest in Kashmir drives her from her home to Harry's village in the Punjab, then to Mumbai, where she's affected by the horrific communal riots there in 1993. She has a respite in Scotland for several years, where she and Harry reunite, before he is shipped back to India to fight in the Kargil War against Pakistan in 1999. She then skips over to New York in time for 9/11 and then to Gujarat for the religious massacres that happened there in 2002. No one's luck is this bad.
All this separation deepens their love, but it's repeated to the point of tedium. And there's no logical reason for much of it—all their missed connections, miscommunications, and misunderstandings could have easily been cleared up with emails or phone calls to each other or people they knew in common. Instead, the two inexplicably correspond through letters, which fail to arrive on time or to the right place for a variety of reasons, and make scant, poorly timed calls. That's not conflict; that's contrivance. Technology is a reality of the present that makes it pretty hard for lovers to be cut off from one another—and impossible for stories like this to be believable.
Mausam is rated Skip.
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