Innocence oh Innocence!. Review on Milenge Milenge

I liked Milenge Milenge. No, I haven’t lost my mind. I am not saying that MM is a good movie. It is in fact a technically weak movie. But thankfully not emotionally weak.It worked for me because it has a little something bollywood movies rarely have these days – Innocence. Now this is not a review of Milenge Milenge – this is a collection of thoughts that came strongly to me when I walked out of the hall after watching this movie.

Hindi movies have changed a lot in the last half a decade and mostly for the good. Nowadays the movies are technically much superior in every way – dialogues, cinematography, choreography, costumes etc. Most new directors genuinely try to come up with something new, something ‘hatke’. Of course, it doesn’t work everytime but the effort is there, maybe because the audience has started outrightly rejecting substandard stuff.

But with the good comes some bad too. And for me the ‘bad’ in the new bollywood is the loss of innocence, the loss of emotional connect, the loss of melodrama. These days everybody is busy trying to be ‘cool’. It is as if film-makers are afraid to show too much emotion lest they be called melodramatic. But the Indian audience has always loved melodrama and this new ‘cool’ is alienating a lot a people from pleasures of cinema. No wonder new terms like ‘multiplex hit’ and ‘small town hit’ have come up – a I Hate Love Storys works only in multiplexes and a Veer works only in small towns. And since the small towns with ticket rates of 40-50 rupees can’t compete with the 200-300 bucks of multiplexes (and overseas audience), film-makers are leaning more and more towards making movies for the multiplex audience since that’s where the real money is.

Coming back to Milenge Milenge, let me enumerate the reasons why it worked for me :-

- Priya (Kareena) is an upcoming choreographer but she dreams of giving up her career after marriage to take care of her husband and children. Politically incorrect! Some will call it regressive. I find it sweet. And refreshing. Go ahead, call me regressive.

- After a long long time a bollywood couple fell in love with each other at first sight. It doesn’t happen in bollywood anymore because it is just not realistic! So what if it is so utterly romantic? The practical youth of today do not identify with the concept of love at first sight it seems. The only exception in almost half a decade was the Veer-Harleen track in Love Aaj Kal but then they belonged to a different era! (The only thing that worked for me in LAK was this track).

- In Milenge Milenge, the characters are normal people behaving in a normal way (or as normally as bollywood characters can behave). Nobody tries extra hard to be ‘cool’. So refreshingly different from movies like I Hate Luv Storys where everybody from the leads to the supporting characters looked like being cool was the aim of their lives. And the only normal character – Sonam’s fiancé – came across as a loser because he was un-cool.

- Kareena didn’t show her legs. Shahid didn’t take off his shirt. Both were fully clothed even in dream sequences. Thank God for small mercies.

- The lack of designer clothes was very refreshing. Kareena played a middle-class, college going girl and dressed as one. Yes, the outfits were tacky, the hair colour atrocious but the lack of refinement actually brought home to me how real she looked compared to her roles nowadays where I notice her clothes and styling before I notice her character. Or any other actress nowadays for that matter.

- The lead couple, for a change, actually looked madly in love. There was an emotional connect which made me to want to see them end up together. And I felt happy when they embraced in the end. The feeling was ‘Thank God they are together’ rather than ‘Why the hell are they together?' which I felt in recent romantic movies like Love Aaj Kal, Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani and I Hate Luv Storys.

The three movies I mentioned above are apparently big hits. And Milenge Milenge will most probably be a flop. Which means that in future we will see more of such romantic movies where the designer outfits will emote more than the lead actors, being cool will be more important than being sincere, and being practical will be more important than being romantic. And innocence? Who cares about it anymore?