You can take the video out of a music video-maker, but you can’t take the small-screen mentality out of a video-maker, even if he’s the hottest shot in the biz. Ken Ghosh’s first feature film packs in the frames with psychedelic emotions, scratch-level sentiments, and 18-something characters who want to be cool dudes and hot chicks—even though John Travolta and Grease went out of fashion in the 1970s.
Ghosh’s Ishq Vishq is well-greased. The characters are almost comic-strip material. They try so hard to be like the urban young collegian, you just want to tell them to be themselves rather than what they are supposed to be.
Take the male protagonist Rajiv (Shahid Kapoor). He’s young, sexually curious (check out his funny-funny American Pie-inspired sequence with Dad Satish Shah trying to explain the birds and bees to his son), and so immature he can’t see true love when it stares him in the face. He only wants to hit the sack with the sweet girl-next-door Payal (Amrita Rao) when she has loved him since childhood. The film’s best sequence occurs right before intermission, when Payal discovers Rajiv’s true intentions and gives him a piece of her mind.
Throughout this wafer-thin, self-consciously “cool” film, you feel Ghosh is pitching the film at the youth market rather than being true to his own vision. The film’s characters are “real” to the extent that they appear to have studied the way college kids walk, talk, and shock. But look closely at them. Their designer clothes are too well-designed and their banter lacks essential credibility.
What Ishq Vishq does rather well is create an alternative reality whereby metropolitan youngsters’ utter preoccupation with matters of the heart and loins becomes a readymade pretext for a brainless film. You don’t mind the raillery and the backroom romancing as long as it’s done with some amount of wit and chutzpah.
Some sequences featuring Amrita Rao—like the one where she sits in the backseat of her loverboy’s car as he and his new girl occupy the front seat—convey a slim sheen of pathos that’s quickly dissipated as the glitter and gloss of splashy college life take over. Once the Rajiv-Payal-Shenaz triangle gets “intense,” it’s time to call in the cleaners for some heavy-duty blowing and drying.
The characters and ambience in Ishq Vishq abide by rules of Gen-X behaviour. They are meant to be shallow and savvy. They end up looking only half the people they’re meant to be. Can’t blame them. Savvy has to do with the words that the characters speak. In Ishq Vishq, the writing is unclear on the wall. Even a silly chick flick like Tujhe Meri Kasam came alive because the brainless banter was intelligently written. In Ishq Vishq, you constantly feel the absence of curvaceous lines. The best that the dialogue writer can come up with is when Rajiv apologizes to his best friend Mambo (Vishal Malhotra): “Chod na yaar.”
To this, Mambo replies, “If I do, this place will stink.”
Reflective of the humour that the dumbed-down generation flaunts proudly? Perhaps. But then how much of the real-life superficiality is to be extended into a film about the young to keep cinema from looking superficial? That’s the question that debutant Ken Ghosh should have asked himself before becoming so keenly clued into the concepts of youth yammer.
A part of the audience (the 20-nothing collegian) may empathize with Ghosh’s treatise on triviality. But the film is decidedly not a mirror of the urban youth. It’s more emblematic of the concerns which preoccupy and finally smother campus films in Hindi. Karan Johar’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai also took us to the same territory. Ghosh’s three principal characters are much younger than Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol, and Rani Mukherjee in Johar’s youth classic. But did they necessarily have to be so taken up with their own callowness?
More than Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Ishq Vishq reminds you of Ekta Kapoor’s campus thriller Kuch To Hai, down to the colour schemes and campus triangle among the three protagonists. In spite of the abundance of ‘kuch’, there’s something vital missing in Ishq Vishq. And it isn’t just maturity. Dangerously, the sheer moorlessness of the more-more-more generations becomes the film’s raison d’être. The film ends up looking like a host of campus films from Hollywood and Bollywood, from American Pie to American Desi to Yeh Kya Ho Raha Hai. Alarmingly, it also has elements from the Indian campus soap opera Kyun Hota Hai Pyar.
What gives the shallow romance an edge of excitement are the actors. They pitch in their might to make the broth bubble with effervescence. Though Shahid Kapoor looks slightly too young to convey mature emotions, this role and its inbuilt callowness fits him perfectly. He dances well, and he speaks his dialogues with the right pauses. That’s more than what we get from most newcomers these days.
Amrita Rao has the author-backed role of the campus “behenji” who loves the hero with decorous wholeheartedness. She emotes on time and comes up with an endearing performance. VJ Shenaz’s campus-bimbo act lacks body. The joke about the hero wooing her by pretending to know cricketer Sachin Tendulkar is completely at Shenaz’s expense. (What would Tendulkar have to say about being so unabashedly lampooned?) As the resident airhead, Shenaz needed to come up for air more often.
The supporting cast—including Shahid Kapoor’s real-life mom Neelima Azim as his screen mother—gets a hang of things. But Upasna Khosla, as the maid who heaves her bosom to the rhythm of floor-mopping, only goes to prove: you can’t take the filmy aspect out of Hindi filmmaking, even if the filmmaker comes from a trendy and forward-thinking sensibility. But Anu Malik’s songs serve Ken Ghosh’s purposes well.
Shahid Kapoor was 22 when he did Ishq Vishq. But he looked 17.
Speaking to Subhash K. Jha on the eve of his debut, Shahid Kapoor said, “The Ishq Vishq director Ken Ghosh rejected me at first. He thought I was too thin and young. I had done plenty of ads and music videos. But I gave that up completely and started assisting my dad (Pankaj Kapoor). I’m lucky because my parents never forced me to do anything I didn’t want to. I chose to be a dance instructor for Shiamak Davar for a while. Eventually, I strayed into doing ads. My first one was the famous Shah Rukh-Rani Pepsi ad during the 1999 World Cup. I thought that was a cool way to begin. But at that point of time, I was too young to be doing films. Somewhere down the line I decided I wanted to be an actor. After Ken said no, I started assisting Dad on a serial he was shooting in Manali. Then I was recalled for Ishq Vishq. I met Ken again and after auditioning he decided I was grown-up enough to do the part. So here I am.”
Shahid Kapoor was trained by the theatre legend Satyadev Dubey, after which he faced the camera for Ishq Vishq. Shooting was a cakewalk. “Ken is a very good director to work with. Since we were all new, there was a lot of give and take on the sets, no one attempted to be one-up on each other. There was a lot of group activity. One of the two ladies, Amrita Rao, had already done two films. Shenaz was veejaying for a long time. She has done an acting course and then a South film. So even Shenaz was more experienced than me. You can call me the bachcha on the sets. But the oldest member of the crew was 35. So Ishq Vishq is a young film by young people. Everyone plays his or her age. The characters look believable. It’s a very sweet film. It isn’t a huge film. It doesn’t promise to blow you away. But it’s big on emotions. It’s the story of one year in my character’s life, the mistakes I make, the decisions I have to make. I mean, how heavy can a campus film be?”
Being the son of two committed actors, the song-and-dance routine appears a bit odd for this lanky newcomer. Shahid Kapoor disagrees. “There are songs and dances. But the character I play is real. I was in college two years back and I went through a lot of what I portrayed. See, it’s a campus film. But everyone, young or old, will find a slice of his or her life in it. The look and clothes on the campus may have changed over the years. But attitudes remain the same. Everyone wants to see how I perform before jumping to sign me. Fair enough. The promos prove I can dance and do the hero-giri. But I have to do more. No matter what, I’m here to stay. All I want to do is be in films. I was lucky to get this break. I hope I’m going to be around for a while. I hope I won’t let my parents down.”
