Where Dunno Y.. tries to take it further than just a furtive liason is in the way it shows the relationship between the two men: the married man nearly reaches the point of breaking off with his wife, but his lover refuses to let him. http://www.indianexpress.com/news/dunno-y-na-jaane-kyun/710247/0Dunno Y...
Na Jaane Kyunby Shubhra Gupta
Posted: Fri Nov 12 2010, 14:30 hrs
Rating:**The title should have been a dead giveaway of the kind of film
Dunno Y.. Na Jaane Kyon turns out to be: a good idea wrapped, and nearly hidden, in clunky execution. Every time something real struggles to come up, it is buried quickly under amateurish acting, or over-written plot points.
Gay persons are not bad people. They are who they are. This is the statement of a fact that can bear repeating in mainstream cinema, but not in the way
Dunno Y.. ends up doing it. It takes a long time to get to the point. Till the interval, in fact, when we discover that a husband who neglects the woman he’s married to, is into men. He gets into an affair with an aspiring model-cum-actor who is “auditioning” (Bollywood euphemism for “sleeping with”) around town. Where
Dunno Y.. tries to take it further than just a furtive liason is in the way it shows the relationship between the two men: the married man nearly reaches the point of breaking off with his wife, but his lover refuses to let him.
For a Hindi movie, this is way beyond anything that’s been shown in the homosexual range till now. Not just in the way the men show skin and suck lip, but in the feelings they share: these are people who want to live together, not just have illicit sex. But
Dunno Y.. stops well short of being a desi
My Beautiful Laundrette or
Brokeback Mountain because it doesn’t go the mile. Scared of putting off viewers, it balances the guy thing with a gal thing: the neglected wife is made to have a fling with the gay husband’s younger brother who has the hots for her. It also situates the gay man and his predicament in a much-too complicated Anglo-Indian family, which has an absconding father (
Kabir Bedi), a still-youthful mother (
Zeenat Aman in a comeback role which gets her to declaim rather than act most of the time) who submits to her lecherous boss because she wants the extras—not for herself, but for her family, which is acknowledged by her cantankerous ma-in-law (
Helen) at a crucial moment.
You never quite feel like abandoning
Dunno Y.. , but you also wish it had been braver and stuck to its core story. Some of the situations are not bad, though, even if the English used by the characters is unintentionally hilarious, and even if some of the physical stuff comes dangerously close to sleaze. Nice takeaway: Helen getting to do a graceful jig after she declares : after all,
mujhse achcha kaun dance kar sakta hai. Director: Sanjay SharmaCast: Aryan Vaid, Kapil Sharma, Maradona Rebello, Hazel, Zeenat Aman, Helen,
Rituparna Sengupta[email protected]