Aaja Nachale - Come back of Madhuri ,Is it ????

The return of Madhuri Dixit ends up telling the tale of Romeo and Juliet but ends up being Much Ado About Nothing. The energy of the aging actresses and a mind set of maker viewer mix eats into the script and the film that could be a master piece turns out to be yet another Mumbai Masala package. The story lacks imagination, the script lacks guts, the screenplay lacks energy and the film purpose. Backed by a huge film making house the Director falters once too often and ends up telling a simple story with too much naivity. Dia (Madhuri) suddenly receives a communication from her dying Guru (Darshan Zariwala) to revitalise the dying Ajanta theatre in a town she left behind one night many years ago. A quick peep into the past and you know that Dia defied local norms when she eloped with Steve (Felix D’ Alveelia) a photo journalist against the wishes of her unforgiving parents ( Vinod Nagpal and Uttara) . Embittered with matrimony andrejected by her parents she looses touch with native India till the letter forces a ‘return to the roots ‘journey. Back home she is confronted with the local MP Uday Singh( Akshaye Khanna) who seeks to demolish the crumbling theatre and replace it with a shopping Mall. Dia opposes the move and sees it as a personal agenda against Indian culture. She has a hostile town that has not come to terms with her decade old elopement. To many theatre is a bad word and she has to get over the challenge. Also joining the battle are the local goons who take upon the task of being the local moral police ( sounds familiar!!) and would not permit the expression of art and see it as a degrading human platform. It is however not long before she gets the town together. She first gets the assistance of a local politician Om Singh ( Akhilendra Mishra) and goes about the task of doing a dance ballet on Laila and Majnu with Imran (Kunal ) playing the unwilling Majnu and Anokhi(Konkona) playing the over enthusiastic Laila. The story has many layers as reservoirs of story telling: the return of an artist to her art in a domestic scenario that accepts her art but not her; the threatening death of many Indian art forms in the light of a growing market economy; the incapacity of town folk to keep pace with urban development; the crisis of conscious of an artist who gave up her art for a marriage that never worked; art in the presence of moral policing; the story of the unwilling Majnu and the energetic Laila- all and every of this permutation with the energetic presence of Madhuri Dixit and the rest would have made a master piece. Every time the camera lingers on the theatre you are reminded of the theatre show that Guru Dutt took for his Kagaz Ke Phool and then see where cinema in our country has journeyed for a price of technical superiority. The film is yet another case of lost opportunities and over simplification in the name of art or commercial film making. Fiction thankfully does not answer question of logic but to build a story of this kind on the flimsy sands of poor imagination leaves one too many wholes and even a marginally thinking audience refuses to follow the fictional ease of life ..

This is a clear case of too much talent and too little delivery. A huge waste of human resource. A star cast with the likes of Konkona, ( over acts) Kunal ( sleep walks) Irfan Khan ( drifts) Divya (sobs) Sushmita Mukherjee ( makes faces) Ranvir Shorey (dazed) Vinay Pathak ( amused) you wonder why they are all assembled if the script was unwilling to give them space. Only Madhuri takes herself seriously. She may have lost voltage on her smile but even she were to do her role from memory this was good enough.
Yet some where she lacks the real punch the take the role on straight and is thus to take to some finely choreographed moments to take the film forward. She looks brilliant in patches and faded in the rest. No the role and the preparation are not visible and that could be the cause for the let down. Of course director Anil Mehta would have to take the bulk of the blame.
If you cannot keep the audience engaged with this kind of a story line and star cast then you surely have failed. To assemble talent is one thing, to make them deliver is another. The film maker believes making a film is like doing the dance ballet in a fictional world and ends doing just that.