Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna (Kabhi na Dekhna)
One word - Agonizing!!!
4 hours of agonizing torture!
This is the kind of movie that leaves a bitter taste in your mouth and ruins the rest of the day and you wonder why you are feeling so bad!
The reasons are plenty once you think about it.
1. The movie takes a serious topic and deals with it very non-seriously.
2. It tries to justify an adulterous relationship.
3. It is very degrading towards women and is filled with sexual innuendos and too many references towards a woman’s butt. What is that all about?
4. It is all about Sex.
5. It is about someone’s twisted view of relationships and how they should work.
At the start I thought this was going to be a very different movie … one which might for the first time be about the emotional bond between a man and a woman. Proved wrong!
The relationships are completely unbelievable. You see Abhishek, a good looking, rich guy who dotes on his wife. She doesn’t even make any effort in the marriage. She rejects him most of the time or was it always, tells him he is a kid and basically treats him like crap. Shouldn’t he be the one having the affair?
Then she meets Shahrukh who is a bitter man. He treats his own kid like crap … the poor thing is scared of him. Not only that, he tells his kid … I’ll cut you into pieces and make a juice out of you and drink it! Err … who talks to their kid like that?
There doesn’t seem to be much of an emotional bond between Shahrukh and Rani. However, a commentary in the background supplies you with the information that Shahrukh feels completely different when he is with her and she makes him smile once again. However, that is not very apparent in the movie since he treats her very rudely most of the time and is very degrading towards her.
Examples: The scene where he tells everyone that he is having an affair with Rani as a joke without any regard for her feelings or reputation. The scene right after that where when she asks him if he will leave his wife and kid for her, he says no. And then the scene where he treats her very degradingly asking her if she had slept with her husband. Huh!
And then the film claims that she loves Shahrukh with a zillion insecurities and who treats her like crap, over Abhishek who is crazy about her. Why? Are you trying to give the message that this is how you should treat women?
And what was the making out scene in the furniture store all about? How corny can you get? Not to mention the whip scene … though hilarious … if you think about it also gives out really crappy signals. Instead of taking her to a sexy lingerie store, he takes her to a weird store, tells her ‘I like cheap’, shows her his butt and gets her that short dress with a whip and a blindfold. Which by the way she wears all the way back to her place? You mean she was going all over New York in that outfit?? Doesn’t it make more sense to come home and change in your own house?
I can understand a movie saying people develop feelings, there is no stopping that. However actions do not happen by themselves. And in this movie they didn’t even happen in a fit of passion and at the spot. In fact the movie very painstakingly shows that Rani and Shahrukh go to this motel and get a room on purpose. It was a conscious decision with enough time in between for them to come to their senses. Now that cannot be forgiven. It is not act of passion or love. It is an act of betrayal!
The movie tries to justify this act throughout. At one point we have an argument between Preity and Shahrukh’s mom. Preity says: ‘There should be limits to everything.’ To which her MIL replies: ‘If you put too many limits then there are chances of them being broken.’ Huh! So what they are trying to say is that since limits can be broken, lets not bother having them. Yep … lets do away with all the rules in the world so none can be broken. What an intelligent solution!!
At another point Amitabh tells Rani that its not her faullt because both love and death come uninvited. Errr love may come uninvited but sex most definitely doesn’t. So lets please stop justifying that.
Not to mention that Rani says: ‘Mafi to ghaltiyon ki mangi jaat hai. Khud Garzi ki kiya saza hai” (You ask forgiveness for your faults. But what is the penalty for selfishness). In other words she is saying she was only selfish but she didn’t do anything wrong?? So there is nothing wrong with betraying someone’s trust … someone who loves you like crazy? There is nothing wrong with breaking someone’s heart? It’s selfish but not wrong? Interesting!
If Rani and Shahrukh were such soulmates as the film claims (although I think the only mating was done in the motel) and if both of them were miserable in their married lives then why couldn’t they leave their spouses and be with each other? Oh wait they were trying not to hurt them, right!? Right!
So this is just a sample of what this film is all about.
Another great review about this movie is at:
Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind
It really puts the movie in perspective 
One Response to “Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna (Kabhi na Dekhna)”
September 14th, 2006 at 11:12 am | Claire says:
1
Great review and I totally agree.
When you watch an SRK movie your least expectation is to get some amount of entertainment out of it. After all that’s what he claims to be, an entertainer. Instead what you get in KANK is a movie making light of one of the most serious issues in human relationships betrayal of trust, and pathetic jokes bordering on or crossing the limits of obscenity.
In one word: disappointing, in three words: kabhi na dekhna.