Insipid Dulha
By Farieha Aziz | Arts & Culture | Movies | Published 14 years ago
Dulha Mil Gaya is your regular, forgettable Hindi masala movie with dance numbers and sappy comedy.
Tej Dhanraj (Fardeen Khan), aka Donsai, is the most eligible and moneyed bachelor in Trinidad and is known for his refusal to get married.
However, he is forced into contracting a marriage with Samarpreet (Ishita Sharma), his father’s friend’s daughter from Amritsar, to fulfill the condition in his father’s will that he be married to get his inheritance. A worried Samarpreet, who hasn’t heard from her husband in a while, arrives in Trinidad only to discover that her husband has been busy carrying on with several of his girlfriends. Running away from him in humilation, Samarpeet is injured and discovered on the road by Shimmer (Sushmita Sen), a friend of Donsai’s and a supermodel. Shimmer, after being told by Samarpeet about what Donsai has done, decides to teach her friend a lesson for his disrespectful attitude towards women. And thus Samarpeet is given a complete makeover and becomes the most sought after girl in Trinidad. The now unrecognisable Samarpeet — known as Samara — turns down the many romantic advances of Donsai to get her revenge on her husband.
The only two characters who make the movie watchable are Shahrukh Khan and Ishita Sharma. In Dulha Mil Gaya, Shahrukh appears briefly in the second half of the movie, as Pavan, a wealthy businessman madly in love with Shimmer. She loves him back, but is afraid to enter into marriage, which she feels will ruin her career. Shahrukh really makes the movie come alive and some of the Shahrukh-Sushmita scenes are quite heartwarming. Samarpreet’s typical village girl reactions and speech are quite funny, and she is also able to evoke pity for the way she has been treated while eliciting admiration for her determination to do something about it.
Sushmita and Fardeen fail to make a mark due to the unimpressive roles they are cast in. The scriptwriters, in trying to make Sushmita’s character resemble the one played by Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde, have shown her as too over the top, particularly in her oh-so-blonde moments and her crazed love for her dog Bozo — for whose birthday she throws a huge bash.
One would at least expect the music and dance numbers to compensate — as those are what many Bollywood movies excel in rather than the story — but other than the song Shahrukh appears in, Adnan Sami’s music and vocals are a complete disappointment.
Farieha Aziz is a Karachi-based journalist and teacher. She joined Newsline in 2007, rising to assistant editor. Farieha was awarded the APNS award for Best Investigative Report (Business/Economic) for the year 2007-2008. She is a co-founder and Director at Bolo Bhi, an advocacy forum of Digital Rights.