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Duplicate: If one is bad, two is masochism

Sharmila Taliculam

Shah Rukh Khan in Duplicate. Click for bigger pic!

If hamming is the essence of acting, Bollywood's one big pork pen. And in no genre, if one can call it that, does this aspect show up better than in comedy.

So you have heroes saying "Huh?" and looking google-eyed at the camera when the yet unsnared heroine scores over them, villains slipping on banana peels, water being dumped on people. Very subtle, you see, this kind of humour.

And who, but who, could beat Shah Rukh Khan at this black,-white-and-16-shades-of-gray kind of role? If one is bad, two is masochism. Duplicate has that flavour. Akin, if you know what we mean, to an extra drink to put behind a hard day, to defeated men convincing themselves that meaning can be infused into life, of old men saying how it was better in their day. In a word, forced; in many, unprintable.

It is this laboured effort that makes one wonder if it wasn't a good thing that Mahesh Bhatt finally decided to get out of direction altogether. This isn't anything you'd expect from the director of Arth, Saaransh, maybe even the slightly maudlin Naam.

Duplicate is a sad, sad attempt at comedy and you get the film that the people who mattered hadn't tried much, and the rest had tried too hard. It's not even funny.

Juhi Chawla, SRK and Sonali BendreClick for bigger pic!

Well, the story. Babloo and Manu are two unrelated people with the same face. Babloo is an innocent mama's boy who dreams of becoming a five star chef.

And one needs to remember that one's paycheck depends on it to sit through the cringe-making scene when Shah Rukh bats his eyelids at him, stomps his feet petulantly and demands a hug. Maybe grown men do do this, but then they clearly haven't grown much.

Then there's the dark one, Manu the goon. His career involves illegal population control, his equipment being gun, dagger and fist. And when he feels he's getting all soft he goes to his lover, played by Sonali Bendre, and paffs her into jelly. Or something like that. And wait, just to make you like him better, the director has him stick his tongue out before carving up his potential victim. It's meant to be reminiscent of the serpent, but ends up more weird than menacing.

Meanwhile, Babloo stumbles and falls for Sonia (pronounced Sawneea) Kapoor, that is Juhi Chawla, a banquet manager of a five-star hotel. The dweeby girl gazes into Babloo's saucer-like orbs and breathes, "Why didn't you meet me earlier"? Bally masochist.

Click for bigger pic!

Manu predictably finds out that someone resembling him is bumbling all over the city and decides to use the doppelganger's name as refuge. Even the Bollywood cops wouldn't consider someone so clearly a congenital idiot could be a crook.

He threatens mom and swain, all in vain. And then, of course, Babloo decides to use what he admits is his "eight-gram" brain to outwit his crooked non-twin. After a climax stretched out on the rack, with money, mother and morals all vying for attention, the good guy stumbles through, victorious, and everyone is happy, particularly those called to review that darned tape of splotchy celluloid.

A stint at Auschwitz or Japan-occupied Manchuria may have been worse than this, but not by much. Shah Rukh has tried hard, too hard. The good guy is whitewashed into ineffectual idiocy for most of the film; the bad blackened into ridiculous villainy.

Click for bigger pic!

So the good guy bats his eyelid, the bad one sticks out his tongue. Do you want us to say more?

Juhi, looking unreal as a clean, innocent banquet manager, passes muster against this backdrop, Sonali looks sexy as a cabaret dancer but little else besides.

In character with the rest of Duplicate, the sets are unrealistic with primaries red, green and blue being the dominant colours, with silver thrown in on reflection.

Only two of the songs pass auricular muster: Mere mehboob, mere sanam and Ek shararat hone ko hai.

The surprise package in the film is Kajol in a cameo role in the only scene that makes you feel better. And you prop up your eyelids when you see the same man in two roles appear together, one's arm around the other. But it's the clean digital work rather than the joy of seeing Shah Rukh being an ass twice over that gets you interested.

Thereafter, it relapses into cinematic indolence and slapstick. If it still works, put it down to the fact that Shah Rukh is still immensely popular; if it doesn't, put it down to the audience's good sense.