/> Starring Amitabh Bachchan, Hema Malini, Rani Mukherjee, Salman Khan, John Abraham, Om Puri, Sareeka
Directed by Ravi Chopra
Rating: * ½

When you have everything going for you, including a top-of-the-shelf star-cast and a powerful socially relevant theme, it isn't easy to mess things up.

Baabul does exactly that. Just why or how director Ravi Chopra manages to make a monumental mess out of a potentially explosive drama is a matter worthy of an inquiry commission.

Years ago Raj Kapoor had cast Padmini Kolhapure as a carefree girl who's transformed into a weeping widow who finally, amidst a tumult of societal protest, marries the silent beloved from the past in Prem Rog.

Writer Achala Nagar adopts the same framework. She forgets times have changed. And widow remarriage isn't quite the burning issue it used to be two decades ago or even a decade ago, specially not in a family where the members seem to have watched the collected works of Karan Johar to behave accordingly.

The first half of the film where Dad Amitabh Bachchan's foreign-returned son Salman Khan wooes and marries the self-respecting woman Mili (Rani Mukherjee) is replete with loud celebratory songs filmed on sets that Johar abandoned five years ago. The choreography, art work and cinematography are more suited to the social dramas of the 1960s than a contemporary work.

It's shocking to see how clumsily Ravi Chopra handles the familial inter-relationships and how much of his inspiration comes from tried-and-tested cinema.

The buddy-buddy bonding between dad Bachchan and son Khan has been done in films as diverse and mood and intent as Vipul Shah's Waqt and Karan Johar's Kabhi Alvidaa Na Kehna, not to mention Yash Chopra's Kabhi Kabhie in a much earlier decade.

It's in the second-half when Mr Bachchan goes husband-shopping for his widowed daughter-in-law that the director gets a grip on the main drama. It may not be too late to salvage the widow's wrecked domesticity. But it's certainly too late to save the film from its catastrophic courtship of conventional drama.

Saturated in superfluous scenes of family bonding as seen mainly through clumsily choreographed songs, Baabul is paradise postponed. Theoretically it appears to be a powerful film about women's rehabilitation in the tradition of B.R. Chopra's Sadhana and Raj Kapoor's Prem Rog.

The characters are too busy posing and preening to get under the skin of the roles. Only Mr Bcahchan and Rani make an effort to light a spark in the dark. There are flashes of genuine drama between the two after Salman Khan's death.

The pick of the lot being the sequences where Rani dances in the rain with her dead husband's memory and the sequence during her post-widowhood karva chauth where Rani devours food in the hope her husband would return.

Such well-written moments of tragic resonance are frittered away in pursuit of a sham glamour generated through characters who exude as much affluence as the mannequins in a costume -jewellery store.

Ravi Chopra's previous film Baghban about old age and negligence worked mainly because of the red-hot chemistry between the lead pair.

Over here you can see Mr Bachchan and Ms Hema Malini are being forced to fake the couple's camaraderie. Their singing and dancing collaboration creates no energy in the deadpan narrative.

As for Achala Nagar's dialogues they go on and on hammering the message in words that dwell in the domain of the deliberately ambivalent.

And really, it's been a while since we heard anyone in a mainstream Hindi film scream, 'Ruko yeh shaadi nahin ho sakti!'

That's what poor Om Puri, playing liberal patriarch Bachchan's super-conservative brother, is reduced to doing.

Puri should consider himself to be lucky. At least he gets to speak. Some of the supporting cast including Sareeka as a silently-suffering widow (her suffering is nothing compared with ours) barely get to open their mouth in this otherwise-overtalkative film.

Finally the onus of sustaining the drama falls on Mr Bachchan and Mukherjee. They try their best to look like a team in a film where the cast and crew seem to be working at cross-purposes.

Salman and John as the two men in the leading lady's apparently-tumultuous life (apparently, because what lies beneath the shallow-rumbustiousness of the film's ritzy exterior, is anyone's guess) are cocky and selfconscious, respectively. The clothes they wear, the songs that they sing and the words that they mouth could've something to do with their fugitive charisma.

Finally if there's any reason to watch this horribly askew social drama it's Rani Mukherjee. Her growth as an actor since Sanjay Bhansali's Black has been steady strong and remarkable. Even in the few scenes that she's given in this film of scant opportunities Rani proves she's far ahead of all her contemporaries.