Date:08/12/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/12/08/stories/2007120859230200.htm

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Andhra Pradesh

Soft and aesthetic

CLASS ACT: Shiney Ahuja and Soha Ali Khan in ‘Khoya Khoya Chand’.

Film: Khoya Khoya Chand

Cast: Shiney Ahuja, Soha Ali Khan

Director: Sudhir Mishra

Ask ye an eternal romantic how is the love story? Might as well ask the world how is the moon glow! Soft. Soothing. Or maybe radiant too. That is Sudhir Mishra’s ‘Khoya Khoya Chand’, a film that pleases the aesthete in us all. He has made a film that moves ever so gently. Yet when the final credits roll, you don’t realise you have been watching this period saga for a couple of hours. Almost like the dew, fresh but fleeting. Mishra’s film is a splendid showcase for colours that are neither muted nor riotous. Just a soothing mixture of the bright and the sober to complement the mood of the film that is a throwback to the times when the film industry was known for its sharks.

It is the story of one such man, a poet-writer – played with dexterous ease by Shiney Ahuja. Soon enough he meets a heroine – Soha Ali Khan in the first author-backed role of a promising career – looking for a protective shadow of a responsible man, even as she meets many of the seamier kind. Throw in a third angle – Rajat Kapoor as a top hero, for whom girls shed inhibitions and everything else – and Mishra’s time-tested triangle is complete. Two guys, one successful and ambitious, the other talented and aspiring, and a girl, bewitching and beautiful, but not untouched by the times! Shades of Guru Dutt’s saga, some murmur. A dash of Meena Kumari’s life? Or is it Waheeda Rehman? Let the arguments go on, in truth Mishra has simply borrowed chunks of life of many yesteryear stars for this story that has pathos as its second name. There is more than an allusion to the casting couch, yet the overriding feeling is not one of debauchery but melancholy. We feel sad at the helplessness of the heroine past her prime. We feel for the writer, looking for that one shot at lasting fame.

Yet after all these moments are put together, the thing that stays with the viewers is one of gentle joy.

ZIYA US SALAM