Review of Guzaarish (2010) by Sharad S — 29 Nov 2010

You know when you stay in the dark for too long and are suddenly exposed to light, all you see is dark patches clogging your eyes; well after watching Guzaarish, I experienced a similar phenomenon , where the black and blue patches lingered on in front of my eyes post the movie.. Mr Bhansali, we get it.. darkness and blue light gives you goosebumps... but you have been there done that.. So get over it..

Now coming to the plot.. or the lack of it.. I have a coined a term for movies in recent times whose directors are obsessed with making every scene look perfect and in the process overlook plot, don't develop characters completely, and spread the screenplay so thin, its practically invisible: "Avatar-ed". I chose that name for very obvious reasons.. Supposedly the biggest movie in cine-history suffers from massive doses of the above symptoms; And so does Guzaarish. The ten line plot is stretched like a chewed up bubblegum to a length it cannot sustain and crumbles under the weight of total boredom. More than debating about Euthanasia, I was weighing my options for submitting a petition to have some form of punishment for badly made movies .. I thought there would be a sensible spread of arguments over euthanasia in the movie. I kept waiting for the special argument as to why this case is more special than any other case up for a Euthanasia plea.. What could have been an unfolding of an explosive clash between morality and legality of euthanasia ends up in scene after scene of well designed portraits and cliched exchanges.. Also I didn't really understand whether they were trying to promote hope for quadriplegics or make them feel even more depressed.

Hrithik does a good job.. Playing a quadriplegic is not an easy task. But his dialogue delivery was very artificial and wannbe. But I have found this a symptom of most of SLB's recent offerings.. Its all part of this look and sound cool package. The lack of substance behind most of things he says makes it even more annoying. Aishwarya Rai.. OMG !!!! I hope she has the excuse that the director made her gain weight for this role or some such reason. because, the bulges were overflowing out of her hideously designed clothes. Any attempts at exuding sensuality fell flat because of .... well the "bulge".. it reminded me of the monster movie ... "the blob"... "the bulge".... gives me the chills...

Coming to the dealing with quadriplegia, I get the dilemma that is being portrayed. Its a very punishing disability and I can understand that people who suffer from this might have gone through such thoughts at some point. But the movie refuses to move beyond the dilemma. The toal lack of plot , and the obsession with making each scene look symbolic and panoramic and visually stunning really gets aggravating after a while.