Khoya Khoya Chand is like a kaagaz ke phool. Not the film by Guru Dutt, a director whose shadow looms large over the Sudhir Mishra film. But literally, like a flower that looks pretty from a distance but turns out to be paper when you take a whiff.

The problem with this wonderfully mounted period piece is that the backdrop keeps coming to the fore. Mishra’s no-holds-barred tribute to Bollywood of the 1950s and 60s invests so much in creating the perfect mise-en-scene of the era gone by that the main story becomes a by-product. The times rather than the characters or the events call the shots and just like the Happy New Year song in the film you keep meandering from one page of the calendar to another.

Add to that how Mishra’s characters, too, remain rooted in their past. Take the telling title song. Even as Nikhat Bano (Soha), a fledgling actress climbing the newfound stairs of stardom, and Zafar (Shiney), a Urdu writer trying to get a foothold in the film industry, throw caution to the wind for the first time, Nikhat keeps hallucinating about her father. At other times it is Zafar who keeps seeing his dying father reaching out to him.

It’s not that Mishra fails to rustle up some vintage cine magic. The painstaking research is evident as he shoots songs like Mehboob Khan shot them in Andaaz, uses the point-of-view camera like Guru Dutt did or raises the Nayak problem of actors not moving with the times. Together with superb lighting (Sachin Krishn) and a lovely musical score (Shantanu Moitra) Sudhir does the difficult job of transporting one to the age of the Nadiras and Nimmis.

But then he makes wrong casting decisions. Perhaps Khoya Khoya Chand’s biggest problem is Soha Ali Khan. Yes, she looks stunning throughout the film but she is NOT Nikhat Bano. As the young 14-year-old who is thrown into the cesspool of the film industry where offers are made every night for plum movie roles, who goes on to choose career over personal life, and then gives it all up for the sake of happiness, Soha is just not up to it. From the body language to the nuances, she is a disappointment.

It is left to Shiney to work in tandem with his Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi mentor to come up with a delicately balanced performance. Yes, he is still unwatchable when he howls, but for the rest of it, he is excellent. So are Sonya Jehan and Rajat Kapoor as the superstars of the era and each member of the ensemble cast — Vinay Pathak, Saurabh Shukla, Sushmita Mukherjee.

It’s just that Sudhir Mishra raised our armaan so much with his earlier work that Khoya Khoya Chand gets lost in the moonlight. Bahut nikle mere armaan lekin phir bhi kam nikle…

P.S:. Mishra leaves a lovely teaser of his forthcoming film, though, on why Devdas was Devdas. Enough to give birth to a thousand more desires.

Pratim D. Gupta

So near yet so far

A mammoth cast, the best of Bollywood’s new-age directors and a virtually unexplored genre — and yet there is something significant missing in Dus Kahaniyaan. So near and yet so far is the phrase that came to mind after sitting through this ambitious multistarrer.

If the 10-in-one film takes a significant step forward from the industry’s previous attempts at episodic films (the disastrous Darna Manaa Hai and its sequel, the equally insipid Darna Zaroori Hai being prime examples), then it also shows that Bollywood still has some way to go before it can manage to tie up 10 loose ends.

The biggest problem plaguing Dus Kahaniyaan is its lack of consistency. There are some very gripping, some not-so-gripping and some downright ordinary stories packed into this two-hour film. So if the Mandira Bedi-Arbaaz Khan starrer Matrimony and Zahir with Manoj Bajpai and Dia Mirza border on the brilliant (with scripts that seem to have been penned by a Chekhov or a Hemingway), then Rice Plate and Gubbare are rendered watchable just by the sheer intensity of the performances. The ones that classify as real damp squibs are Jimmy Sheirgill’s High on the Highway (“bizarre”), Lovedale starring Aftab Shivdasani and Neha Uberoi (“bland”) and the much-touted Dino Morea short story Sex on the Beach (“ all smoke, no fire”).

Things also get significantly heavier after the interval with the more “serious” stories being packed in one after the other. So if the first half whets the audience’s appetite for more, then the post-interval portions are a letdown.The Sanjay Dutt-Suneil Shetty track — ambitiously placed at the end — seems to be a watered down, 10-minute version of another Sanjay Gupta film, Musafir.

Predictably, Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi and Nana Patekar take the top acting honours while Manoj Bajpai is also very good. The rest, more or less, do what the script requires of them. Only Suneil Shetty manages to ham even in a five-minute role!

While the 2006 episodic film Paris, je t’aime (Paris, I love You) consisted of 20 stories helmed by 22 directors, Dus Kahaniyaan has six people in the director’s chair, with producer Sanjay Gupta directing the maximum number of them. Two parts of one particular film (Rise and Fall) have been directed by two directors — another first for Bollywood.

The novelty of the genre as well as the big names in acting will work in Dus Kahaniyaan’s favour for a start. If nothing else, Dus Kahaniyaan marks the return of the Naseer-Shabana magic.

Priyanka Roy