Film Review: ‘Mausam’

Director: Pankaj Kapur
Cast: Shahid Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor, Anupam Kher, Supriya Pathak
Rating: 1/2 star

Directed and acted with the flatness of someone who’s taken a handful of antipsychotic medication, Mausam should be declared a health hazard. But the film is not merely unwatchable; the dialogue delivery is so universally bad that it’s also unlistenable. Part love saga, and part history mumbo jumbo—the plot incorporates real-life incidents—Mausam is ultimately 100 percent cheese. The bulk of this nearly three-hour epic is third-rate schmaltz that pays only lip service to romance. If you must watch it, take along some Fevi kwik; it is the only thing that will keep your eyes from rolling repeatedly at the hoary clichés.

Writer-director Pankaj Kapur’s script is riddled with so many inanities that only the sudden appearance of Shahid Kapoor’s moustache helps stir you out of your stupor. The film seems solely targeted at the actor’s fan base of 14- to 16-year-old girls who might be impressed enough to tell their Facebook friends about it. As for the military sequences, IAF personnel would find the material so laughable that they might wish to boot the film out of the cinemas on its blue-uniformed rear. (You can’t say they didn’t try to stop it from getting to the theatres in the first place.)

The story not only follows the formula but italicises every element of it. The first 20 minutes of the film, set in Punjab, are breezy, but all the characters are stereotypes, and their interactions are numbingly predictable. They also look and sound like they’re from the pre-Independence era, even though Mausam takes place in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Punjabi youngster and wannabe pilot Harry (Shahid Kapoor) and Muslim girl Aayat (Sonam) meet and fall in love with each other, but bizarre twists of fate keep separating them. Yet, for reasons unknown, Harry and Aayat don’t rely on standard modes of communication like postal addresses, email IDs or telephone numbers to keep in touch. With such gaping plot holes, director Kapur seems almost deliberately to sabotage any of the film’s possible strengths at every juncture.

Hackneyed scenes and uproariously contrived twists that incorporate the Kargil war and Gujarat riots into the script provide the setting for a seemingly endless supply of platitudes without creating a single marginally interesting moment. The editing, too, is all over the place. One scene in particular, involving our hero piloting a malfunctioning aircraft, is hysterically bad. While Binod Pradhan’s camera locks onto every clench of Shahid Kapoor’s jaw muscle, the footage is obliterated with blurry close-ups and jagged cuts. Also, the special effects, such as the hideously fake CGI plane, are actually worse than those used in the 1967 low budget sci-fi film Wahan Ke Log.

It is difficult to judge the quality of the acting in Mausam. The lines are so corny, the characters written in such a one-dimensional manner that it is hard to take any of the performances seriously. Nearly every dialogue that drops from Shahid Kapoor’s mouth comes with the muffled thud of ham, and is timed with sidesplitting ineptness. Sonam Kapoor looks as uncomfortable delivering her lines as you’ll feel sitting there listening to them. And yet, nothing compares to the mind-bogglingly awful climactic scene that grabs you by the collar and laughs uncontrollably at you. Without giving too much away, we’ll just say there’s a white horse, a Ferris wheel, an orphan and the two leads strolling around a riot-hit Gujarat. The sequence takes everything terrible that has come before and transcends it to reach almost cartoonish levels of absurdity. It is a conclusion bad enough to gain legendary status as one of the most hilariously appalling Hindi film endings of all time. Mausam is a bloated, sludgy catastrophe that looks and feels phony in every detail. It’s hard to imagine that a worse movie will come out this year.