Having just watched Silsila again recently and had a great discussion about it with a friend, this review really struck a note. Being a die-hard Silsila fan, I have to argue that although Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna goes that next step beyond the traditional conscious decision of Silsila, that was a different era and Silsila did as much as that generation could handle.

CAUTION- many plot give aways in this review!
-Sumita Sheth

Bollywood`s new good girl
Anoothi Vishal / New Delhi August 19, 2006

Preity Zinta's character in Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna breaks the mould, exults.

When director Karan Johar calls Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna the film he “grew up with”, he means the divorce. Kabhi Alvida... ostensibly takes Bollywood forward by several lightyears in that it is what Silsila could not be: a coming-of-age film for cinematic sensibilities that have stubbornly refused to keep pace with modern times.

So here we have brave new protagonists with less than perfect marriages, people who defy Hindi film tradition not by straying — for Amitabh and Rekha did much the same and so did countless others — but by, horror of horrors, not returning to the fold, to the notion of essentially Hindu morality that we have hitherto held up as “Indian” and ideal.

In Kal Ho Na Ho, it’s predecessor from the Dharma Productions stable, a dying Shah Rukh Khan tells Saif Ali Khan that he is “giving” him Naina (Preity Zinta, lady love to both) on one condition: “Is janam mein Naina teri, agle cheh janamon mein meri (she is yours in this birth, but mine in the next six),” he says.

This, in essence, is an expression of the worldview upheld by Bollywood down the ages, where marriage is an institution not just for keeps but for seven lives! “Janam janam ka saath,” as the song goes. Kabhi Alvida... is a break from this paradigm, albeit not quite in the “grown up” fashion 30-something Johar may have led us to believe.

Even if you overlook Shah Rukh’s over-the-hill-going-on-16 type of frankly ugly sartorial style, a neurotic Rani Mukherjee’s infantile dreams of romance — last seen by 18-year-old Mills and Boon heroines (though now I hear, even they have grown up), there is the question of how pathbreaking the final resolution really is.

Despite the divorce, the answer must be, not quite. Sure, the transgressing lovers are allowed dreams of happily ever after (though how that will come about given two such flawed personalities is best left in the realm of suspended disbelief) but only after their love has got moral sanction from society and family represented by their former spouses.

This comes after a suitable period of atonement — three years, wherein they live apart and in relative poverty — and the exs finally and conveniently cheer them on as they run to catch the train of togetherness — and pardon the Johar-tongue.

While we may laugh, or despair, at Bollywood’s latest attempt at progressive cinema, discount the divorce track and Kabhi Alvida... is a grown up film in other ways. You have to give it to Johar when it comes to delineating Ria’s (Preity Zinta) character.

Modern, unapologetic and very real, she is perhaps the first career woman in Bollywood who takes her work seriously, places it above her relationships, is ambitious without being guilty or a villain.

Completely breaking the stereotype, Ria wears good clothes — not just the pants in the house — parties hard, even gives a social peck or two to a man other than her husband and neglects her child yet remains quite the good girl.

In a brilliant inversion of Bollywood tradition, it is not she but the plainer, more diffident, and more goody Maya (Rani Mukherjee), who transgresses conventional morality and has the extra-marital affair.

Continue reading courtesy Life & Leisure.