Film Review: Aksar

Take an intriguing suspense story the sort of story you'd see on a one-hour tv series like Star Bestsellers or Saturday Suspense -- cast it with low to middling star value actors of the acting caliber you see on Television every second day, throw in some random songs that wouldn't have been missed had they not been there in the first place, and what do you get? A very well shot and edited suspense drama that holey cow! has got a convenient screenplay plagued by one huge hole that you cannot ignore, and which therefore, renders half the film as implausible. But if you can be so kind as to overlook the convenience of the screenplay, Aksar does hold your attention in places.

Risen-from-Television director Anant Mahadevan's Aksar is about a womanizing fashion photographer Rikki, who generally wakes up each morning with a different woman in his bed whose name too he can't remember. "A man doesn't spend a night with a woman to find out her name" is the stylized line this most unlikely looking Casanova uses to make his dry point! But the long and short of it is that Rikki is a lady killer who has models in fact womankind eating out of his hand, and who, before long, is hired by a millionaire young NRI, "I'm-not-a-killer" Rajveer (Dino Morea) for a strange assignment. Turns out the NRI is saddled with a wife Sheena (Udita Goswami) for three years now, and they don't get along. Rajveer wants out, Sheena wants to continue with the good life her pre-nuptial agreement with Raj has assured her for this lifetime (she owns half of his millions now), and guess what Raj does?

He approaches Ricky to seduce Sheena, so Raj can catch them in the act and throw Sheena out of his life on charges of adultery.

That happens soon enough. Raj walks in on the philandering twosome after a steamy session, but there's a shock waiting for him. Instead of being scared due to guilt, Sheena is brazen and defiant! Cool as a cucumber, and tells Raj to shove off she has no regrets "I'm just fulfilling the the vow I took during our wedding to emulate you in all that you do! You womanize too, and I'm only emulating you! Now get out I'm tired (sik!) and I need my sleep!"

The door slams on Raj's face in the story, and in the screenplay, it slams on logic. If Raj wanted to throw Sheena out of his life, all he had to do was get proof of the adultery she's now openly committing with an equally brazen Ricky -- who's now refusing to go back -- and he could have got his divorce, end of story! But wait! The film's reached only 60% of its running time yet, so what does Mahadevan do? He makes Raj the regretful and slightly jealous husband who wants her back! Who pleads with Sheena to return to him, coz he's seen the folly of having neglected her. But Ricky and Sheena carry on, singing and smooching away to gay abandon, and the helpless "I'k-not-a-killer" Raj just mopes, waiting in vain! Till suddenly, Ricky is murdered!

So the slightly intriguing adult marital drama now changes tracks to suspense, and before long, someone gets their comeuppance, and we have a twist in the tale ending that's rather well stylized with dialogue and action.

Dino said recently on a local radio station in Mumbai, "Whoever says I can't act, go and see Aksar, then talk to me." Well, one's seen Aksar, and Dino, you need to slog on dialogue delivery, and limber up get that stiffness out. Udita, blessed with a role of a highly strung, simmering, dissatisfied and bored wife, wastes the opportunity by giving the character a unidimensional screechy, highly strung, overacted, farcical treatment, converting Sheena into the kind of wife the viewer would want to knock on the head and relieve Raj and himself of his misery. But she does carry her scanty clothes rather well, though.

And as for Emran Hashmi, he definitely must have been born with the lucky lips Cliff Richards made famous through his song. And considering he doesn't even remotely look like a guy who could have women swooning all over him, he should be thanking his stars that the Bhatts' gripping thriller Murder was his launch film because, when it clicked due to its overall plot, Mallika and the characterizations, it opened up the flood gates in Bollywood for similar roles for him. And Hashmi's reached the end of his tether of limited, or very limited, acting prowess (wrong word!). His limited repertoire of expressions had run out after Murder, and ever since then, he has been repetitive, unbelievable and hence unidimensionally flat. In Akshar, he's actually reduced to making faces in the name of acting and emotions, and by no stretch of the imagination does he look like a man any woman leave alone womankind would lust for. Redefines the wannabe playboy especially in his dancing, Ek Baar Aa Ja Aa Ja being a case in point. That the song itself had no point in the film is besides the point. In fact, Aksar would have been been pacier but for the songs that come as speedbreakers rather than story movers, but then, how else do you take a one-and-a-quarter hour story and stretch it to 14 reels?

If this is their best acting talent, Hashmi, Dino and Udita Goswami have proven with Aksar they will never hold a movie on their own.

Give this one a miss, unless you like whodunits, and are willing to overlook that one big hole in logic