by Subhash K Jha

Starring Salman Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Jackie Shroff, Om Puri, Riimi Sen, Mohan Joshi, Suniel Shetty
Directed by Priyadarshan
Rating: ***

No matter what the film's fiftful flaws, the pieces of life's jigsaw fit in beautifully in Kyun Ki.

Celebrating the conundrum of life , Priyadarshan's bitter-sweet take on life and lunacy conveys that peculiarly exaggerated lyricism which is typical of this versatile and virile director.

Thiru's cinematography and Sabu Cyril's artwork sweep across the Ooty outdoors and the hi-tech Hollywood styled indoor representing a mental institution. The film's melodrama suggests a looming link between the theatre of the absurd and the vagaries of life. The crisscross of dramatized relationships provides the director with an opportunity to explore the darker side of love and life.

Priyadarshan has Salman Khan to support his journey into the dark side of the moon. Khan played dark repressed outraged characters in Tere Naam and Phir Milenge . His unclothed performance holds up a lot of the improbabilities in Kyun Ki and actually makes us overlook them.

Salman is almost as endearingly wacko as Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest—the film to which Priyadarshan turns more than once for support sustenance and inspiration.

If Milos Foreman had grown up making Malayalam films he would probably have done Kyun Ki. Very often Priyadarshan pulls out all stops to deliver monstrously exaggerated blows in the storytelling.

Om Puri's turn as the asylum-head is specially scary...stuff that constitutes Hollywood's slasher films . Largely though, the director soft-focusses on the delicately -drawn spiral of romantic emotions that emerge from the main characters...Salman's smirky sensitivity and that extraordinary mix of brattiness and eccentricity are used to the hilt.

Kareena again proves herself the queen of distending drama. As the doctor on duty, she is silently effective. In that one sequence when she gets to know that Anand(Salman) has been cured and will probably now leave the asylum and her attentions(shades of L.V.Prasad's Khilona) Kareena's litany of anguished expressions are worth watching.

Riimi Sen as Salman's blast in the past is surprisingly well-presented. The French-convent ambience where the romance grows, provides a rhythm of the riviera to proceedings.

But the flashback flashes too long. The sequences and episodes overstay their welcome. After a while the characters seem like nice but unwelcome guests. You really want to pack them off to their happy finale.

But the morbid end-game (which borrows liberally from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Asit Sen's Khamoshi) is way too defeatist . It destroys the spirit of optimism that the film seems to uphold throughout.

It's hugely interesting to watch the way Priyadarshan builds a pyramid of relationships within the confines of the asylum. While the inmates and the hospital staff are deliberately caricatural(madness is always a crazy puzzle in our films) the key relations work beyond the immediate rock-video styled bustle of lunacy.

Jackie Shroff as a kindly doctor has never been in more sensitive shape in his recent films. His pain at watching his benefactor's son suffer the wages of lunacy is palpable.

The Shroff subplot has a well-furnished complete look , lacking in some other stranded strands in the storytelling.

Though done in satisfying shades of longing and pain Kyun Ki is ultimately a casualty of an inconsistent vision. Too many thoughts and working styles crowd the narrative. Every mood from Milos Foreman to Asit Sen and L.V Prasad comes into play. The end-result isn't maddening.

But the material could've done with a firmer hand –just like the hero who's allowed to break too many rules of disciplined institutionalization.