Date:06/04/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/04/06/stories/2008040657510200.htm

Andhra Pradesh

Insipid to the core

NO GOOD: Milind Soman and Dino Morea in ‘Bhram’.

Film: Bhram

Cast: Milind Soman, Dino Morea, Sheetal Menon

Direction: Pawan Kaul

For quite some time Dino Morea is trying to be his own man at the box office. Unfortunately, nobody is doing him any favours. Director Pawan Kaul joins the list with a film so insipid as to be a challenge of patience.

A few minutes into the film and you wonder if you can sit through this one.

At the end it gives you one lesson: model-turned actors are non-actors.

And Kaul does not quite have the director’s acumen to deliver a story that promises, and a setting that is hip and appealing for the multiplex crowd.

Kaul has two heroes: Dino and Milind Soman.

The latter is a rich guy who sheds no sweat for his sweet success. The former is luckier: he gets to flirt with his bhabhi, lock lips with his girlfriend, and never has to push a file to earn his millions!

It is all hunky-dory and the family settles down to welcome a new entrant: the younger brother’s girlfriend whom he intends to marry. There is a bit of problem though: the moment she sees the elder brother, she is reminded of a certain happening a few years ago when her sister was criminally assaulted and murdered. Was he the man?

Hideous

The story has lots of promise, the actors less so. Milind Soman looks hideous with his long locks and Dino Morea looks perpetually perplexed, wearing the same expression from bedroom to boardroom. And Sheetal Menon as a girl who cannot let go of the past, real or imaginary, is a complete washout in her first film.

She walks like a model, talks like a beginner. Worst, she does not quite have the looks to get the looks.

Botched up

And Kaul botches it up with a series of four-letter words. Does he really believe that a multiplex-going guy ends his every other sentence with a word to assail the senses?

Really, ‘Bhram’ does nobody any favours. Get rid of any illusion of catching up with this film. Bad acting, listless music, vulgar dialogues, it has mediocrity written all over.

ZIYA US SALAM