3.5 long-winded-love-sermons out of 4
Aditya Chopra’s Mohabbatein is a film enamoured by the sheer concept of being enamoured. A love story starring two of Bollywood’s strongest and most well-known actors, Chopra’s film insists that love lives forever, while simultaneously serving as a challenge to antiquity. It’s easy to watch this film and get lost in Jatin-Lalit’s music—a score that permeates every miniscule iota of Chopra’s movie. Indeed, it’s also easy to watch Mohabbatein and leave falling in love with the very concept of love. Where Chopra succeeds, however, is in his ability to weave metaphor into every line of his script, insisting that the audience rethink their presumptions about love and tradition.
Mohabbatein’s story, however, is cliché and unoriginal—down to its characters, its plot, and even its setting. Taking place at a prestigious university—run by an uptight authority figure who denounces the virtues of love in favour of honour, tradition, and discipline—the lives of all who attend Gurukul change when a handsome and creative professor is hired to teach three new students the value of love. In a sense of the word, Mohabbatein is equal parts Dead Poet’s Society and Animal House. Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan plays the university’s uptight principal, while Shahrukh Khan plays the former student who returns to show the school the true meaning of music and love.
The film’s paint-by-numbers plot is only weakened by its core group of lead characters—three young men whose enrollment at Gurukul, a university whose prestige is only surpassed by its relatively lax class schedules, coincides with their emotional and romantic maturity.
Enough about the male characters. Sadly, one struggles to describe the female leads as characters. This is an early aughts romantic drama and, as such, the lead female roles can really only be described as lacking. As the romantic interests for the three boys, the girls lack character, agency, and substance. To those looking for an intricate analysis of love from the perspectives of young men and young women finding their way in life, one suggests that time be invested elsewhere.
The issue of time—specifically, the precise amount of time that must be invested into Mohabbatein—will be one of the film’s most glaring issues for contemporary viewers. At a staggering 216 minutes—slightly above average for Bollywood films—Mohabbatein is what western audiences might call an epic, and what those versed in Bollywood might call slightly longer than usual.
Mohabbatein is long, sanctimonious, pedantic, unoriginal, and almost utterly lacking in any progressive social attitudes. For instance, why must the film’s only overtly Sikh character be used for comedic relief?
The question quickly becomes, why even bother recommending this film at all? Why not simply call it mediocre and leave it at that?
The answer is quite simple: Mohabbatein is visually stunning, incredibly well-acted, incredibly scored, and features a story that connects with audiences on a purely emotional level. Dance sequences choreographed by Farah Khan spring to life largely due in part to Chopra’s talent at centralizing movement. Manmohan Singh’s cinematography is sublime, and the film’s setting is made powerful through soft, white glows and deep, harsh rays.
Chopra’s direction plays up the dramatic elements of his script, and though contemporary viewers might find certain close-up choices amusing—especially the manner in which Chopra insists on closing in on Bachchan’s face at least once during his many sermons—his talent behind the camera lends the film a quality of abject professionalism.
However, if praise is to be given to any aspect of the film’s production, it must be heaped upon Mohabbatein’s actors. Each character is a walking miasma of clichés and stereotypes, but the film’s male and female leads showcase a kind of enjoyment that ensnares the viewer from the first ludicrous line delivery. The characters seem incredibly unrealistic—in many ways, Mohabbatein seems disinterested in realism—but the actors who portray the film’s protagonists find themselves caught up in the show.
As for Bachchan and Khan, their conflict alone is reason enough to watch this film. Separately, the actors steal every scene that they’re in. Together, the energy between their characters is electric. Near the film’s conclusion, Khan’s character makes the point that his position in the plot hinges on Bachchan’s involvement. Watching Mohabbatein, one wonders if Khan didn’t spend the film’s entire production schedule practising for his brief scenes against Bollywood’s most famous living legend.