Neeraj Pandey is a director who is mostly associated with fast-paced thrillers. Romance used to feel like a weak link in some of his movies. The Dhoni biopic was perhaps the only film in which I have felt that Neeraj Pandey had managed to depict romance in a convincing way. Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha, Pandey’s true blue love story attempt, at times, gives you hope that it might actually take a brave step and show us something we don’t usually see in Bollywood. But as the story progresses, the love story is only shaping up as cheesy rhetoric about a man’s sacrifices, and the back-and-forth melodrama just can’t land smoothly on the emotional runway.
The movie is about Krishna and Vasudha. Back in 2001, these two were in love while living in the same chawl. But something unfortunate happened, and Krishna was sentenced to 25 years of jail term. In the present day, Krishna is released from the prison. What was the incident that took away a huge chunk of Krishna’s life, the changes that happened to Vasudha and Krishna during those two decades, and how the eventual meeting of both of them went is what we see in Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha.
There are sporadic instances in the film where you would feel that Neeraj Pandey is trying to have a more mature perspective toward true and selfless love, as the characters in the movie are in their 50s. However, the outdated structuring of melodrama does not really allow the film to enter a space that will make you empathize with these characters. If you look at a movie like 96, you can see that there are a lot of meaningful silences and glances that would make you feel the pain of the characters. When it comes to Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha, everything is verbal, and rather than the energy of the characters in the younger bits, there is rarely a moment where you will feel moved by the selflessness involved in the tale.
At the beginning of the film, they have put this card that says something along the lines, some of the things you are about to see are real, the impossible ones. So I am guessing Neeraj Pandey heard about this unreal story from someone and thought there was a scope for a romantic Hindi film. But being a true story is not enough to make things interesting for the viewer. The major problem with Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha is the lackluster and flat storytelling. You can see Neeraj Pandey struggling to give a sense of newness to the conflict and also staging the pivotal event in the story. You just don’t feel anything hearing the various iterations of the same event. There is this effort in the second half to depict Abhijeet, the husband of Vasudha, as an antagonist. But it was just one of those deliberate and unconvincing distractions Neeraj Pandey used in order to make this flat love story look interesting on paper.
The music by Pandey’s frequent collaborator, MM Keeravani, is perhaps the only takeaway. Remember that beautiful melody, Kaun Mera from Special 26? Almost all the songs in Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha have a similar emotion attached to them. Much like most of Neeraj Pandey’s work, the production design was pretty underwhelming, and the cinematography also failed to make an impression. For some reason, I have felt that after A Wednesday, when Pandey started to get the budgets, he has become a creator who is more focused on written content and less concerned about the visual language and staging of scenes.
Ajay Devgn is an actor with a limited set of expressions, and considering the fact that he is playing the version of Krishna, who has spent more than two decades inside a jail, the typical style of Mr. Devgn suits the character. Tabu, on the other hand, has given her best to make the melodramatically written character somewhat real. The heavy lifting, by the way, is done by the young actors Shantanu Maheshwari and Saiee Manjrekar, who played younger versions of Krishna and Vasudha, respectively. Even though the drama in the performance is kind of loud, one could sense the intensity of the emotion, and there was a palpable chemistry between them. Jimmy Shergill plays the role of that slightly insecure yet understanding husband of Vasudha.
Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha feels more like a desperate attempt to salvage a cliched story by doing narrative experiments and teasing with possible twists. But none of those efforts land well to enhance or better the basic cheesy tonality of the whole story, and hence, the film feels like an outdated creation.
Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha feels more like a desperate attempt to salvage a cliched story by doing narrative experiments and teasing with possible twists.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
