By Sugata Basu

Umrao Jaan (2006): Second Hand Debacle

The new epidemic of re-creating old classics that grips the Indian film industry today has led us to horrors such as Umrao Jaan (2006). It is absurd to imagine that a lackluster performance and deficient direction can be concealed with brilliant costumes and multi-million sets. The film was marked with jarring relationships, trite dialogues and forced emotions and I went home with a blurred memory of what was one of the most beautifully narrated stories in Indian cinema.

The movie opened in a theater near me one weekend and I bought a ticket in trepidation, knowing it was probably a mistake but hoping it would at least hold a candle to the older version. Umrao Jaan is a story of a young girl stolen and sold into the famous courtesan culture of the 19th Century Lucknow. It is a story of heartbreak and betrayal. But above all, it is the story that transforms human emotions into art, a triumph of a woman’s pain.

If music is a prelude to a movie then Anu Malik’s renditions for Umrao Jaan should have been a blaring warning. The songs were pushed into the movie to compensate for the lack of directorial story progression. The most important relationships, the ones with her father (Parikshit Sahni), her guardian (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) and her lover (Abhishek Bachchan) seemed fake and contrived. Titillating scenes in bed and ineffective songs filled up scenes that should been used to establish the beauty of her central relationship with Nawab Sultan. The courtesan was reduced to a mere prostitute.

Comparison apart, even on its own steam the story runs astray this point on, reducing it to any run-of-the-mill romance overflowing with clichés. It is driven forward by the male protagonist - the arrogant lover who kills for love, the scorned lover who leaves his sweetheart to find his path and the jealous lover who suspects betrayal - sending Umrao back to her desolate life. Umrao Jaan is relegated to sobbing red eyes and a phony strength, which evokes no empathy from the audience.

The film starts with Umrao narrating the story of her fate to a very implausible Hadi Ruswa (Anwar Nadeem). It, needless to say, ends in the same circle with the image of an emaciated Umrao. What should have been a sense of pathos is replaced with a sense of relief that the movie has finally ended.

This interpretation of Mirza Mohammed Hadi Ruswa's Urdu novel was all disillusionment. It robbed the mystery and the beauty from what was one of the greatest epics of love and loss.

Images courtesy Umrao Jaan